


How to be Friends with Secret Agents

by Shadowscast



Series: Enough Time [4]
Category: Once a Thief (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Original Character Narrator - Freeform, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 23:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19345300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowscast/pseuds/Shadowscast
Summary: 1) Try not to ask questions that you don't want to know the answers to.2) Hone your ability to compartmentalize.3) Work on your lying and sneaking-around skills.4) Set clear boundaries.5) Prepare for your life to change in unexpected ways.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much to Yourlibrarian for beta-reading!

Has this ever happened to you? You meet someone new, you spend some time with them, you start to feel like you know them pretty well—and then boom, you suddenly discover that they weren't who you thought they were _at all_?

One minute, I think I'm playing wise fairy godmother to a couple of babes in the woods. The next, my babes are saving me from a hail of bullets (okay, one bullet) and it turns out they're undercover secret agents. _Secret fucking agents_. What the hell? How is that even a real thing in my actual life?

* * *

When I woke up on the Sunday after the Two-Ring Circus, closer to noon than I'd like to admit, my memories of the shooting and everything that came after felt almost like a dream. Maybe I should say nightmare. I knew it had been real, but it didn't _feel_ real.

That's what everyone else was saying, too, when I went over to Mom's place. She'd thrown open her doors to everyone who hadn't wanted to go home alone from the ER, and by the time I got there, Sunday brunch was in full progress. Bagels and lox were being consumed in quantity, and I barely had time to get my coat and boots off before someone pressed a mimosa into my hand.

Everyone had their own story of the night—hearing the shots, seeing the guns, running in panic or throwing themselves to the floor. They weren't very interesting stories, when you got right down to it, but clearly the act of telling them over and over again was helping everyone calm down and process their experiences. My version of the story made me the centre of attention for a while, since I'd been up there on the stage getting shot _at_. I sipped at my mimosa and turned my frightening, disjointed memories into a breathless narrative, automatically slipping into my Jasmine persona as I relived the night's events in this much safer space.

Everyone wanted to know how Mac was doing, of course, and what had happened after we left the hospital in the limo. So I got my first little taste of lying to my friends. Lying by omission, mostly, which if you're being snarky you could describe as business as usual for a lawyer. And all right, professionally, you'd have a point. But for the past decade I've been committed to living my truth, and it's been wonderful. I've gained so much more than I've lost. Contrast my life before and after coming out, it's the grey of Kansas versus the rainbows of Oz.

Anyway, I digress. The truths I was concealing now weren't _my_ truths, they were Li Ann's and Mac's and Vic's. And actually, this wasn't the first time I'd helped someone hide a secret identity. Hell, I'd been doing it for David for years, keeping his connection to Ebony Stalking under wraps. We'd even done some real cloak-and-dagger stuff, costume changes in rent-by-the-hour motel rooms and fake out-of-town conferences. So in some sense, you could say I was ready for this.

Ready for ... what? That first day, I didn't really have a clear idea of what I'd gotten myself in for.

Who were Li Ann and Mac, really? They weren't quite the young, lost souls that I'd taken them for—not if they'd been secret agents on assignment the whole time. Li Ann hadn't been trying out drag to explore facets of her own identity; Mac wasn't wasting his potential in a dead-end minimum wage job. They were professionals, and they'd come to the club to protect Ebony Stalking, and they'd been lying to me from the beginning.

But. 'It would seem,' their boss had said in the limo, 'that my _secret agents_ have been lying to you considerably _less_ than I would have preferred.'

'Basically everything we told you was true,' Mac had confirmed. 'We just left out some ... details.'

Well. They weren't exactly _minor_ details, were they? The fact that they worked for a shadowy government agency. And before that, they'd been in a Triad gang? And they'd both done jail time. I really wasn't sure how to reconcile all that with who I'd thought they were.

When I'd been getting to know Li Ann and Mac—when I'd _thought_ I was getting to know them—I'd pretty quickly gotten the impression that Mac was in trouble. The drinking, the mysterious injuries to his hands, the troubling references to the recently-dead possibly-abusive ex. When Vic had called me up Saturday morning and told me he was worried that Mac might be suicidal, I hadn't been entirely taken by surprise.

I'd thought those kids were in over their heads, frankly. Vic hadn't wanted to bring Mac to the hospital, and I'd helped out by keeping Mac company all afternoon and then bringing him to the club in time for the show—but the whole time, I'd been trying to think of how to convince him to get some real help.

Then—well. It turned out that Mac was a secret agent, and I was the one who was out of my depth. And for a minute or two I'd thought that Mac's whole downward spiral had been just a fiction constructed to give him a reason to spend Saturday with me. I'd felt disoriented and a little betrayed—like I'd fallen for an elaborate prank—but at the same time, it had been a relief to conclude that Mac was okay after all.

But no, apparently the personal crisis was real. And the mysterious woman who called Mac, Li Ann and Vic her employees had upped the ante by revealing that Mac had already attempted suicide once, in prison.

So Mac and Li Ann weren't who I'd thought they were, but they still needed a friend. Maybe more so than I'd previously guessed—it sounded as though they hadn't been _allowed_ to have friends, before this. How did the whole secret agent thing work, anyway? James Bond didn't have any friends that I could recall.

I was still wondering about that later in the day, when I got up my nerve to call Vic's cell phone. Neither Mac nor Li Ann had ever given me a number, but Vic had given me his the previous week when he'd called me for help getting Mac's shift at the club switched. And that was yet another interaction that I wondered about in retrospect. Who was Vic, really, and what was his real relationship with Mac?

When Vic answered the phone, I felt a sharp combined rush of anxiety and relief. I hadn't been confident that the number would still work. "Vic," I said, wondering if that was even his real name. "Hi. It's Benjamin. I hope I'm not disturbing you. I wanted to check if Mac and Li Ann were all right."

"Oh, hi," Vic said. "Yeah, they're doing okay." He still sounded like himself. Well, of course he did. What had I expected that talking to a secret agent would be like?

I chatted with Vic for a little while, and then he handed the phone over to Mac, who was with him. It turned out that Li Ann was there too; all three of them had spent the day together, which I was relieved to hear. Even if they were professionals, I didn't think any of them should be alone after the events of last night.

In fact, it sounded like the three of them were going to be sticking together for the rest of the week. Mac told me that they were all staying at his apartment, writing case reports. He said that they were writing the reports on parchment, using dip pens and inkwells, which I wasn't sure whether to parse as some kind of obscure sarcasm or not.

So it sounded as though Mac was okay, for now. I thanked him again for saving my life, and then we made dinner plans.

I told Mac that I wanted to get to know him and Li Ann as _themselves_ , not undercover. Mac sounded enthusiastic about the prospect. We made plans to meet at the Rainbow Room while it was closed, for privacy. We set the date for the following Saturday, to give Mac time to recover from his injury and illness.

Dinner. With secret agents. At least I had a whole week to get used to the idea.

* * *

The next Saturday, the front door buzzer at the Rainbow Room rang at three minutes past five. I'd been waiting for it nervously.

I felt like I had blind-date jitters, which was silly, because this certainly wasn't a date, and I wasn't going in blind, either. I'd known Mac and Li Ann for weeks.

Except I really hadn't, had I? Well. That was a question to be explored tonight. I opened the door.

There they were, all three of them, huddled close together and wrapped up against the cold. They were all tall, fit, and absurdly attractive. Li Ann was carrying two big, fragrant paper bags with the name of a Chinese restaurant printed on them, as promised, and Vic had a bag from the LCBO. They smiled at me, and piled into the club.

My secret agents. It was such a cartoonishly improbable element to have suddenly entered my life. Finally facing them in person after a week of anticipation, I could barely even take the idea seriously.

"Just go ahead and throw your coats on one of the tables," I said. "Here, I'll take the food and drinks."

I set the various bags on a round table near the bar. The three agents started stripping off their outerwear, starting with the hats and gloves. I turned to watch, fascinated by the idea that I was seeing them as themselves for the first time.

Li Ann shucked her coat quickly, and I immediately noticed that she was wearing the same suit that she'd worn for her performance as Lee Way in the Two-Ring Circus. Interesting.

Also interesting: Vic was taking Mac's coat off for him. For a moment I thought they were doing a butch/femme thing, which surprised me; that wasn't at all the vibe I'd gotten from Mac. (But I sternly reminded myself again that I didn't know Mac and Li Ann at all; effectively, I had never met them before tonight.) Then I noticed how gingerly Mac was pulling his arms out of the coat, and I realized that the gunshot wound must still be hurting him.

Mac had taken a bullet for me—that was one terrifyingly real thing that I knew about him.

Coats off, they settled around the table. Vic opened up the LCBO bag first, and pulled out a six-pack. "I guess it's a bit weird to bring beer _to_ a bar," he said a little sheepishly.

"No, you're right, the bar isn't open and I wouldn't want to mess up Casey's inventory tracking," I said. I took the bottle he handed me and looked at the label. It was a Tsingtao—a Chinese beer, apparently. "I've never had this brand before."

Vic rolled his eyes. "Mac and Li Ann refuse to buy anything else. Anyway, it grows on you." But meanwhile, he was pulling another bottle out of the bag—a bottle of mineral water, which he set in front of Mac. So it looked like Mac was abstaining from alcohol entirely for the moment. I wondered if that was a significant development, but the moment didn't seem right to ask something so personal yet. We were still strangers, really.

Then we started opening up the bags of food.

"This smells wonderful," I said.

Mac grinned. "It's authentic Hong Kong cuisine, from our favourite place. Mmm, yeah, I'm gonna start with the pig's liver congee."

Vic rolled his eyes. "Don't worry," he said to me, "I made them get shrimp fried rice and General Tao chicken, too."

I smiled at both of them. "I'd like to try a little bit of everything." In fact I didn't recognize most of the dishes that were now arrayed in front of me, but I figured that tonight was a night for adventure.

Li Ann had found the bundle of utensils in the second bag. She distributed chopsticks to herself and Mac, and a plastic knife and fork to Vic, and then considerately held up a choice for me.

"I'll try the chopsticks, but I'll take the knife and fork as backup, thanks," I said.

For a minute or two, we were fully occupied with sharing out dishes. The table was round, but the three agents had clustered close together with Mac in the middle, opposite me. This made it easy for me to take them all in at a glance. As they started to eat, I watched them closely, trying to pick out clues about who they really were. 

Their body language hadn't changed. Li Ann was still reserved, Mac was still ebullient. Like Li Ann, Mac was wearing a suit, although unlike her he wasn't wearing a tie.

Vic was dressed more casually, in jeans and a green flannel shirt that matched the colour of his eyes. I'd met Vic only briefly last week, so I had less of a sense of disorientation when I looked at him—there wasn't the paradox of false familiarity. Vic looked older than Mac and Li Ann—mid-thirties, maybe. About the same age that I'd been when I'd come out myself, which gave me an instant feeling of kinship, thinking about how that had turned my own world upside down.

But. I sipped my beer—it was maltier than I preferred, but tolerable—and reminded myself again that none of the things that I thought I knew about these people were necessarily true. Over the course of two weeks' dance rehearsals, Mac had spun an engaging romantic tale about his supposedly-straight, supposedly-platonic friend who he'd fallen in love with, and I'd followed the updates like a soap opera, cheering Mac on when he reported each advance in the relationship. But Mac had been undercover; maybe he'd only been making up stories that he thought I would relate to.

Well. Time to start asking questions.

"I hardly know where to start," I confessed. "I don't even know what I actually know about you! I mean ... do I even know your real names?"

"You know our first names," Li Ann said. "I never gave a last name."

"I was working here under my real name," Mac said. "Not that it matters. All my I.D. is fake anyway. I don't think I even legally exist." He said it offhandedly, as though it weren't a deeply startling thing to say.

Vic looked surprised, and turned to Mac with a frown. "What do you mean, you don't legally exist?" I took note of that: they didn't necessarily know _each other_ very well.

Mac shrugged. "I don't even know what country I was born in."

"That doesn't mean you don't _exist_ ," Vic said, looking troubled.

Li Ann swallowed a mouthful of sticky rice, and made a wry face. "I definitely don't legally exist. I was the fourth child in my family, and it was illegal to have more than two."

"You were born in China, then?" I inferred. I vaguely remembered that the famous one-child policy had started out as a two-child policy, and I thought that the time frame matched Li Ann's apparent age.

She nodded. "Canton province. My parents were poor farmers. Eventually they sold me; that's how I ended up in Hong Kong."

Well, shit. This conversation sure got heavy fast.

Mac and Vic didn't look shocked at what she'd said, so I guessed that they'd already known that detail. I, on the other hand, hardly knew what to say. " _Sold you_?" I repeated stupidly.

She nodded. "When I was twelve. I ended up in a brothel. I wasn't there very long, though, before the Tang family acquired it, and the godfather let the underage girls go." She calmly picked up another mouthful of rice.

I noticed, through the glass tabletop, that Mac had put a hand on her knee. But Mac's eyes were on me. "So, yeah, the Tang godfather adopted both of us, and that's how we met," he said, lightly. "Then—ten years in the family, some shit happens, we run away, explosions, we get arrested, one of us thinks the other one is dead for a while, we get recruited by a shadowy government agency, and boom, here we are."

It was pretty obvious that Mac was running interference—moving the conversation along before I could ask any shocked questions about Li Ann's experiences in the brothel.

I wouldn't have, anyway. I'd been around the block enough to know that just because someone revealed a biographical detail apparently calmly, one couldn't assume it was something they found easy to talk about.

The day I'd had lunch with Li Ann, she'd offhandedly mentioned having had 'involuntary sexual experiences' when she was younger. At the time, I'd given her the number for a sexual assault help line, and known that I couldn't do anything more for her unless she asked for it. Later, when I'd found out that she was an undercover secret agent, I hadn't known what to think of the whole thing.

And now? I thought I might at least remind her of the help line, at some point. She might be more receptive now that she wasn't maintaining an undercover role around me. But now was clearly not the right time.

"So, was everything you told me before about your own childhood true?" I asked Mac, to take the attention off Li Ann.

Mac made a so-so gesture. "Most of it was true. Only I told you I ran away from my mother in Hong Kong. Actually it was my asshole con-artist father that I ran away from. My mother was dead by then. I was trying to simplify the narrative."

"I'm sorry," I said. "About your mother, I mean."

He shrugged. "She was shot by Burmese government troops during a drugs bust. I, um, don't really like to talk about it." 

Vic and Li Ann were both sending concerned looks Mac's way now, and I realized that I'd just blundered straight from one set of casually-recounted horrific childhood memories into another.

All right. Mac and Li Ann's childhoods were _astoundingly_ terrible. Time to retreat and regroup. "So, Vic," I said, turning to him. "How did _you_ become a secret agent?"

Vic gave a tight smile, and stabbed a chicken ball with his fork. "Nothing like them. I was born here. Grew up in Kingston. I was a cop. I worked Vice and Narcotics. Then I got busted on drugs charges, ended up in jail. When I got the offer to go work for the Agency instead of serving out my sentence, I jumped at the chance."

Li Ann was frowning at him. "Why do you tell it like that?" She turned to me. "Vic wasn't bent. He was set up by his squad when he wouldn't turn a blind eye to their corruption."

Vic just shrugged.

Mac nudged Vic in the shoulder, and grinned at me. "Yup, Vic here is _innocent_. Not that it does him any good. He's serving a life sentence anyway, just like us criminals."

I shook my head, confused. "What do you mean, a life sentence?"

"I don't work for the Agency _voluntarily_ ," Mac said. "The Director gave me two choices: work for her, or die."

I hoped that Mac was joking, or exaggerating. "That's not even remotely legal," I mentioned, just in case.

Li Ann shook her head. "That doesn't matter. The Agency is outside of the law." And she clearly wasn't joking.

I started to feel rather disturbed. "No part of the government is outside of the law," I insisted.

Vic reached across to put a hand on my arm. "Listen," he said, very seriously. "You're a lawyer. The law matters to you. I was a cop. I understand. When you leave here—when you're not with us—you're better off forgetting you ever heard about the Agency. Don't try to fit it into your understanding of the world. Just leave it off to the side. It's real, and it's secret, and it's dangerous. If you start trying to find out more about it, or God forbid you get it into your head that you need to _tell_ people about it, something very bad might happen to you. So just don't, okay?"

"Okay," I agreed reluctantly, deeply disconcerted.

In the silence, Mac started to reach across the table for a container of noodles but stopped short, wincing. Wordlessly, Vic leaned in and pulled the container closer to Mac. It wasn't the first time during the meal that they'd done that. In fact, a part of Vic's attention seemed to be permanently attuned to making sure that Mac didn't need to complete any painful movements.

The love between them was quite palpable. In addition to Vic's careful attentiveness, there were plenty of other signs. They were constantly brushing against each other with gratuitous little touches. And whenever Mac glanced in Vic's direction, his smile got three shades brighter.

This made me wonder again about their relationship—whether the stories Mac had told me about _that_ , while undercover, had been true.

It seemed like a safer thing to talk about than the nature of the shadowy government agency, so I decided to ask.

"Yes," Mac said immediately, cheerfully. "Everything was true."

Vic cast a suspicious sideways look at Mac. "What _did_ you tell him?"

Mac grinned, flashing white teeth. "I told him that I won your previously-straight heart with an hour-long blowjob."

Vic blushed. Li Ann looked bemused—of course, she'd been present when Mac had told me that story.

I took pity on Vic. "He told me that you were very sweet, and kind, and good-looking," I said. "And now I can see for myself that all of that is true."

In fact, I realized, so far I hadn't discovered that they'd told me any serious lies at all—apart from their jobs, of course, and the entire reason why they'd shown up at the Rainbow Room in the first place.

So maybe they weren't strangers to me after all.

I contemplated that a little more, while struggling to pick up a slippery mushroom with my chopsticks.

What had I _thought_ that I'd known about Li Ann and Mac, before I'd found out that they were secret agents?

I'd thought that they were terribly young, and a little bit lost, and definitely in need of some help.

I'd believed that Li Ann was exploring her identity via drag, and in retrospect _that_ had almost certainly been just for her cover. But on the other hand—"Li Ann," I said, "I can't help but notice that you're wearing Lee Way's clothes tonight."

She looked down at herself in automatic reaction. "Yes," she said, sounding a little uncertain.

"We're going to stick around after dinner, when the club opens," Mac explained. "Get in some dancing."

Vic gave Mac a quelling look. " _You_ are not dancing."

"I can slow dance," Mac wheedled. "Even to the fast songs."

"We'll see." Vic sounded unconvinced.

"Anyway," Mac said, "the point is, Li Ann didn't want to give up on drag after the case ended."

"Hm," I said. "So let me get this straight. You came to the club in drag that first time because you were undercover."

Li Ann nodded. "The Director wanted me to find a way to get close to Ebony Stalking, since we were trying to protect her."

"But you discovered that you liked it?"

She gave a slow, shy grin, and glanced sideways at Mac as though for support. "Yes," she said.

"Well," I said. "Neat."

"Everything I told you that day we had lunch together, about how being in drag made me feel, was true," she said. "And it took me by surprise. I definitely learned things about myself that I didn't expect, in the course of that case."

I smiled back at her, feeling a reawakening of the connection I'd felt the day we'd had lunch. "I'm not a secret agent," I said. "But I often find that I learn new things about myself when I least expect it."

"Tell me about it," Vic said, with feeling.

I looked at him, considering the nature of the new things he'd apparently learned about himself in the past few weeks. I decided I might as well ask what was on my mind, but I prefixed a disclaimer. "Stop me at any point if my questions are too intrusive, please. But Vic, I'm curious: was Mac really the first man you were ever attracted to?"

Vic hunched his shoulders in a gesture midway between shrug and surrender. "First and only."

Mac grinned. "I'm basically irresistible."

Li Ann rolled her eyes. "No you aren't."

"You're asexual," Mac said. "That doesn't count." And then he used his chopsticks to feed her a piece of bok choy, which she accepted.

"So you took that one on board?" I asked her.

She nodded while still chewing. "Thanks for telling me about it," she added, after she swallowed. "It was helpful to have a name for it."

"I offered, before, to try to find you a discussion group," I remembered. "Did you refuse because you were undercover?"

"Yes," she said, a bit ruefully. "But I probably still need to decline. Just because the Director's letting us talk to _you_ doesn't mean we can start going out into the world, and acting like regular people."

"Why not?" Mac said to her. "I distinctly remember, the Director said we could be part of the community here. We'll keep our cover identities from the case, and Ben will run interference if we need it."

"I don't actually _know_ of a group, anyway," I mentioned, just to make sure I wasn't raising expectations unrealistically. "It's a pretty rare orientation, really. But I can ask around. There might be something at one of the universities. You wouldn't be any older than some of the grad students—what are you, the same age as Mac?"

"She's two years younger," Mac said, poking her elbow.

"Nineteen _months_ ," she retorted, poking him back.

_That_ exchange sure made them sound like siblings. Vic snorted, suppressing a laugh.

Mac abruptly gave a little gasp and raised a clenched fist to cover his mouth. I thought at first that he was also smothering a laugh, but a moment later it was clear that he was stifling a sneeze.

"Gesundheit," I murmured automatically.

Vic turned sharply towards Mac, with a frown. "You're supposed to warn me," he said, which struck me as slightly odd.

Mac still had his eyes squeezed shut and his fist pressed against his mouth and nose. His shoulders lifted again.

"Nope," Vic said, and in a quick movement, grabbed both of Mac's wrists and pulled them down. 

Mac turned towards Vic and buried his face against Vic's shoulder. Then he sneezed twice more—audibly, this time, although muffled by the flannel of Vic's shirt.

Vic caught my eye, and flushed. "Please, _please_ don't ask us to explain that," he said.

I tried to school my expression to neutrality, although I had found the whole thing a bit strange. Li Ann, meanwhile, was just nibbling on a bit of deep-fried squid and looking unconcerned.

Vic was still holding Mac's wrists. "Are you done?" he asked Mac, quietly and quite tenderly.

Mac nodded without lifting his head from Vic's shoulder.

"Okay." Vic let go of Mac's wrists, and lifted a hand to caress the back of Mac's neck. "Do you need a tissue?"

Mac nodded again.

Vic fished a kleenex out of his jeans pocket, and pressed it into Mac's hand; Mac sat up, and turned away from the table to gently blow his nose.

The whole odd little exchange had really emphasized the childlike vibe Mac gave off sometimes—and Vic had quite a caretaker thing going on. I wondered, for a moment, whether this dynamic between the two of them was a form of play, the acting out of a kink. I quickly decided it probably wasn't, though, at least not in any sort of deliberate way. There was a slightly harried edge to Vic's solicitousness over Mac, like Vic was constantly worried that Mac would come to harm if Vic didn't pay close enough attention.

Actually, Vic probably _was_ worried about that. Mac was clearly not being as careful of his injury as Vic wanted him to be, as witnessed by the way Mac kept trying to reach across the table for his own food and Vic kept darting in to do it for him. And this wasn't a novel dynamic for the two of them. I remembered the very first time Vic had called me—he'd wanted to get Mac's shift swapped around because he was sick, and when I'd expressed my confusion about why Vic was the one making the call, Vic had said that Mac had 'an insufficient sense of self-preservation'.

Mac grinned suddenly, interrupting my train of thought. "Hey," he said, "You know what you _haven't_ asked us about yet? Our jobs."

"That's true," I admitted. I'd been trying to reconcile who they really were with who I'd thought they were, and I realized that I'd been avoiding facing the one most incompatible detail: the fact that they were secret agents. "Well, I really don't know where to start. What do secret agents _do_?"

"We lurk in the shadows, we fight the bad guys, we keep the world safe," Mac replied flippantly.

Li Ann rolled her eyes. "Mostly we go on stake-outs."

Vic shrugged. "It's not that different from police work. Except with more undercover gigs and less paperwork. And the criminals we deal with tend to be more ... colourful."

"Colourful?" I repeated, unsure how to interpret that one.

"Bizarre," Mac contributed.

"Quirky," Li Ann added.

"We do get a lot of the weird ones," Vic agreed.

"Can you give me any examples?" I asked.

They all looked at each other for a moment, and then Li Ann shook her head. "The Director told us not to share operational details," she said. "I think that means we shouldn't tell you any specifics about our cases."

"Okay," I said. "I understand. Well, in general terms, then. Have you had any other days as exciting as last Saturday?"

"Oh, that wasn't exciting," Mac said. "Come on. One guy, with one gun? He got off _three shots_."

"One of them hit you," Vic murmured.

"Grazed," Mac said, breezily.

"It was pretty tame, as shootouts go," Li Ann concurred.

I wasn't quite sure if they were joking with me. "You did seem a bit shaken at the time," I mentioned to Li Ann.

She shrugged. "Mac got shot and collapsed. _That_ doesn't usually happen."

"So, you're saying you've had more ... _exciting_ shootouts?" I asked.

"Frequently," Vic said.

"Not just shootouts," Mac added. "Remember that guy you fought with the chainsaw?"

"Oh yeah," Vic grimaced.

"There was a tank, once," Li Ann said.

I still wasn't quite sure if I should be taking them seriously. "Does that kind of thing happen to you a _lot_?" I asked.

"I've only faced the one tank," Li Ann said.

"But we do get in a lot of gun battles," Mac said. "We had one yesterday." He plucked an uneaten piece of chicken from Vic's plate, and popped it in his mouth.

They were definitely serious. Holy shit. "What happened yesterday?"

Mac swallowed his mouthful and waved his chopsticks vaguely in the air. "Oh, there was this thing with a Colombian drug cartel."

"Not the whole cartel," Li Ann clarified. "Just ten key members."

"The three of you fought ten men?" My voice possibly cracked a little.

"They only had three guns," Li Ann said. "It was reasonably even."

"Are you all okay?" I asked, feeling rather stunned. The shooting at the Two-Ring Circus had shaken me to my core, but it wasn't even the most dangerous thing that had happened to them this _week_. 

"Mostly," Li Ann said. "Mac got a little banged up again."

"He has a broken _rib_ ," Vic clarified, sounding aggrieved.

"Oh, shit." I looked at Mac. " _That's_ why you've been moving so gingerly. I thought it was still the gunshot wound bothering you."

"Yeah, well, that kinda got reopened too," Mac said, looking sheepish. "I had to jump down a lot of stairs really fast, and the stitches ripped. Which is probably what slowed me down enough for that guy to land that kick. I swear, _usually_ I do a lot better in a fight."

"Yeah, you really shouldn't have had to fight yesterday," Vic said, in the tone of someone bringing up an argument again that he'd already lost.

Mac shrugged. "The Director got what she wanted out of it."

"True," Li Ann said; Vic grimaced, but nodded.

"So your jobs are ... quite violent." My throat was feeling dry. I took a good long pull on the Tsingtao, then put the bottle down carefully and asked the appalling question that had just occurred to me: "Have you ever killed anybody?" I felt like I was channelling Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies.

"Sure," Mac said.

"Of course," Li Ann added.

Vic was the only one who looked slightly uncomfortable. "It's part of the job," he said.

I felt like I had to sit with that one for a minute.

My little lost lambs had fangs.

Mac and Li Ann had grown up in a Triad gang. I hadn't really thought through the implications of that one yet, had I? Shit. They seemed so _sweet_.

"We're not assassins, though," Mac said. "We only kill people if they're actively trying to kill us."

"Or somebody else," Li Ann added, and took a sip of her beer.

"Ah," I said, a bit weakly. "Well, thanks for clarifying that."

"I mean, it's not like that's a _big_ part of what we do," Vic said. "Once in a while it comes up."

Li Ann and Mac both gave him puzzled looks.

"Vic," Mac said, "We killed three men _yesterday_."

Vic's neck flushed, and he darted a very uneasy look at me. "Guys," he said in an undertone that was still easily audible to me, "Maybe we don't need to _emphasize_ that. I don't think Ben really wants to hear about it."

"No, I do," I said, trying to sound a lot calmer than I was. "So after you kill someone, do you ... fill out paperwork? Get counselling? Is there a follow-up investigation, some kind of third-party review? How does that work?"

Mac and Li Ann looked confused, but Vic looked like he wanted to crawl under the table. "We really function more like soldiers than police," he said. "With respect to all that."

"But we're not at _war_ ," I pointed out.

"Well..." Vic said, "Maybe it depends on how you look at it."

I shook my head. "It's not a fuzzy concept. We are _not_ in a situation of armed conflict between nation-states. What you're talking about are _civil_ actions, and they should be bound by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, at the _very_ least."

"What's that?" Mac asked.

Vic winced.

"I am finding this ... very disturbing," I said then, perhaps a bit redundantly.

"Look," Vic said, drawing himself up straight. "I already told you, it's dangerous to think too hard about this or start asking questions. It's a _shadowy_ government agency. Its operations are shady. But—do you think last Saturday was the first time we saved your life? It wasn't. We saved your life when we stopped terrorists from releasing a hemorrhagic fever virus in a downtown shopping mall. We saved your life when we stopped a nuclear bomb from going off on Bloor Street. We're in the shadows, preventing all kinds of crazy shit you can't even imagine. You _need_ us. I'm sorry. The world just doesn't work the way you thought it did."


	2. Chapter 2

_The world just doesn't work the way you thought it did._

That was a thought to disturb me, all right.

Saturday's dinner left me troubled. I _liked_ Li Ann and Mac and Vic. But oy vey, their Agency and its implications terrified me.

David was the only person I could talk to about it. I was hesitant to talk on the phone about these matters, but I knew I'd see him Monday at work. I popped by his office a little after nine.

"Hey," I said. "I saw Mac and Li Ann again. Do you have time to talk?"

David frowned. "Not here. Let's meet at the Y tonight, shoot some hoops?"

* * *

When we got to the YMCA, the desk clerk let us know apologetically that the basketball court was reserved from 7:30 onwards, but we could play for 20 minutes if we wanted. That was perfect, actually. We had a short one-on-one—finishing 18 to 10 for David, which was about typical—and then we climbed up into the bleachers to talk in private.

"I did some investigating," David said, right off the bat. "Last week, after the limo ride. I tried searching on the internet."

"How do you search for info about a nameless agency?" I asked, intrigued.

David grimaced. "Well, I went down a lot of conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. I'd think I was getting somewhere, and the next thing I knew I'd be knee-deep in a five thousand word rant about the British royal family getting replaced by reptile shape-shifters. By Wednesday I was starting to doubt my own sanity. Then I found a few references here and there to some articles by a writer called Oswald, on an online conspiracy magazine called 16.5 degrees. Apparently Oswald claimed to have had a personal run-in with three mysterious government agents, right here in Toronto, real Men in Black style. And apparently these agents were two very tall white men and a tall Asian woman. Sound like anybody we know?"

"That wasn't _necessarily_ Li Ann, Mac and Vic," I said. "It could be a coincidence."

David shrugged. "Well, anyway, I went to the magazine and I tried to find Oswald's original article, and it wasn't there. I emailed the editor, and asked if any of their content had been removed. Big mistake. You know what happens when you ask a _conspiracy theory_ website whether any of their articles have mysteriously disappeared? Oh my _God_ , the crazy that came to my inbox after that."

"So, dead end?" I hazarded.

David rolled his eyes. "I only wish. So, next I talked to Padma from IT."

I nodded. "Makes sense." Padma was pretty good at recovering lost electronic documents; it was helpful sometimes in divorce-related disputes.

"So, she did her magic and found archived copies of Oswald's original articles in some nook or cranny of the internet. And it looked like just more crazy conspiracy shit, maybe written by someone who liked _A Clockwork Orange_ a little too much."

"Uh, the movie or the book?" I asked.

David shrugged. "Whichever. The articles were following the emergence of a small group of anarchists. At first it seemed like just standard ineffectual anti-establishment bullshit, but then they literally shot up a law firm. Anderson & Cray."

"Well fuck," I said, "I remember when that happened. Last June, wasn't it? The Globe & Mail said it was a former employee who had a mental breakdown."

David shook his head. "According to Oswald, it was the droogs."

"Droogs?" I repeated.

"That's the Clockwork Orange vocabulary," David said. " _Did_ you read the book?"

I shook my head. "I saw about five minutes of the movie on cable one night. It looked way too violent for me."

"Okay, whatever, the book isn't important," David said. "What _is_ important is that after Oswald had been writing about the droogs for a few weeks, he got a visit from the Men in Black. And after the Men in Black incident, Oswald posted just one more article, claiming that the droogs were the result of a mind-control experiment gone awry."

" _Mind control_?" I repeated. "Okay, I think we're back in cuckoo territory here. That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with what Li Ann and the boys do."

"Which is what, exactly?" David asked. "You said you talked to them?"

I nodded. "We had dinner on Saturday. And frankly, what I learned was extremely disturbing. It seems that their Agency is functioning as a sort of extra layer of law enforcement, but with very little in the way of operational regulations or oversight, and involving substantial use of lethal force."

"Hm," David said. "Okay, that's scary. But I haven't finished my story yet."

"You were on the mind-control experiment," I reminded him, which sounded reassuringly crazy in a nothing-to-worry-about kind of way.

"Yeah," he said. "At that point I figured I'd hit a dead end—Oswald was just another nut. That was, oh, mid-afternoon Friday."

"But?" I prompted, because his inflection had indicated that there was still more to the story.

David lowered his voice. Not that either of us had been speaking very loudly up to this point, but now I really needed to lean in to hear him. "I got a phone call. Friday night. It was the woman from the limo. She said that it had come to her attention that I'd been digging up history that was supposed to stay buried."

"Oh shit," I said, suddenly remembering what Vic had told me about the danger of asking questions about the Agency. "Did she threaten you?"

David shook his head. "She _politely_ asked me to stop trying to investigate her agents, and particularly not to involve any poor, innocent IT people in the future. Those were her words. And then she invited me to dinner."

"Dinner?" I repeated.

"She asked me to be her date at a black-tie fundraising dinner on Saturday."

Well, that came out of left field. "Did you go?" I asked.

"Yes," David said. "And wow. This was a high-stakes dinner. Benjamin, the _Prime Minister_ was there. And the Premier. And the Mayor. As well as the CEOs of several of the biggest companies in the province, and a few movie stars. And that lady from the limo stayed by my side the whole night, and chatted familiarly with everybody—and still, somehow, I never caught her name. But at one point, when it was just the two of us, she said to me that if I ever decided to go into politics, she'd be happy to make sure that my 'extracurricular activities' didn't come up as an issue unless I wanted them to."

I blinked. "Was she bribing you, or threatening you?"

"Both simultaneously, I think," David said, looking very lost. "It was definitely a show of power. We do _not_ want to fuck with her. But also ... I think she sort of implied that she'd like me to be Prime Minister someday, and that she could make it happen."

"Well," I said. "Shit. Do you want to be Prime Minister?"

"I'm a gay, black drag queen," David said. "I cannot even express how profoundly unlikely the idea of me being elected Prime Minister is."

"But?" I said.

David slowly broke into a grin. "I'm having dinner with her again next Friday."


	3. Chapter 3

I got a call on my cell phone early Wednesday evening, just as I was packing up to leave the office. It was Mac.

"Hi," he said. "Want to check out the Art Gallery of Ontario with me tonight?"

"Er," I said. "Well, this is short notice. Maybe another night?" I didn't have other plans for the evening (unless changing into my pyjamas at 8 p.m. and watching the news on CBC counted as plans). But I was still processing everything I'd learned about Mac and the others, and I really didn't feel ready to face him again yet.

"Ah, sure," he said, sounding disappointed. "I mean, yes. We could do something another time. But are you really busy tonight? Because Vic and Li Ann are working, and I need somebody to stay with."

Oh. Shit. I snapped my briefcase shut, one-handed, and sat back down in my office chair. "Is there anybody else you could call?" I asked.

"Yeah, I mean, if you're not free I'll just have to spend the evening with Dobrinsky again."

"Dobrinsky?" I asked. The name faintly rang a bell, but I couldn't place it.

"The Director's right-hand man. You sort of met him; he was driving the limo."

"Right," I remembered. "He likes marching band music?"

"Yes," Mac agreed with a sort of audible wince. "And he _doesn't_ like _me_. And this'll be the third night in a row that Vic and Li Ann are working late, and Dobrinsky is definitely getting sick of babysitting me."

"I see." I had some concerns here—Mac's use of the word 'babysitting' was worryingly infantilizing, for instance, though I supposed he was being flippant. And I really wasn't sure how to reconcile the implication that Mac was still under 24-hour suicide watch with the fact that he'd apparently been engaging in armed conflict with a Colombian drug cartel on Friday.

I could say I was busy. I did not have to get involved in this. I could be busy tonight, and busy again the next time Mac or Li Ann called me, and eventually they'd stop calling. My life would go back to normal, and I could pretend to myself that there were no terrifying, nameless government agencies operating in the shadows outside of the rule of law.

But. Secret agent or not, Mac was also a _person_. Twenty-six years old, and struggling, and asking for my help.

I'd always had a soft spot for lost lambs. It was why I'd approached Li Ann in the Rainbow Room that first night, when I'd seen her leaning against the wall looking awkward and alone.

And anyway, I _liked_ Mac. He was always fun to spend time with. And while the realities of his background and profession did scare me (very reasonably so), they also, let's be honest, intrigued me.

The world didn't work the way I thought it did, and Mac was a window into the secret underlying reality.

"Okay," I said. "I can meet you at the gallery."

* * *

Mac was already waiting in the AGO atrium when I arrived. Vic was with him. Their heads were close together, and they appeared to be chatting companionably. Then Mac noticed my approach, and gave me a cheerful wave.

"Hi," I said. "Uh, hello Vic. I thought you were working tonight?"

"Yeah," Vic said. "I'm just here for the drop-off." He fished in his coat pocket and pulled out a small prescription pill bottle. "Here. He needs to take one at seven, and another one at eleven. Don't let him have the bottle, don't let him take one early or extra, _and_ don't let him skip a dose. It's important." He must have noticed the look on my face, because then he added, with a frown in Mac's direction, "Mac said that he talked to you and you were okay with all this."

"He said that he needed company for the evening. He didn't go into details." Nevertheless, I took the bottle from Vic. I glanced at the label before putting it in my own pocket—it was codeine. "Er, _how_ late were you anticipating that we'd stay out?" I added, thinking of the eleven o'clock painkiller dose I was apparently supposed to supervise. The AGO closed at nine on Wednesdays; when Mac had suggested the evening at the museum, I'd assumed I'd be home to catch The National at ten.

"I should be done by midnight at the latest," Vic said. "I'll call you when I'm ready to come meet you, and you can let me know where you are then."

"So," I said, feeling the need to clarify the extent of my role here, "the intention is that I'll stay with Mac until you meet us again?"

"That's right." Vic turned to Mac. "You _said_ you'd explained this to him."

"It's not a big deal," Mac said. "We'll hang out. We'll have fun. It'll be fine."

Vic turned back to me, looking serious. "He's not allowed to be alone yet. You can't let him go home before I'm ready to pick him up. Are you actually okay with this? There's still time for me to bring him to Dobrinsky's."

I was beginning to see why Mac had referred to Dobrinsky 'babysitting' him. And I was starting to have some real concerns about the level of supervision Mac was in need of, and whether I was equipped to provide it. "Ah," I said, "I feel like we had this same conversation a week and a half ago, but—if Mac's still having so much difficulty that he can't be left alone, perhaps he should be somewhere ... safer?"

"Dobrinsky's house is safer," Vic muttered, in a bit of an undertone.

"I don't _actually_ need this," Mac said to me, making a wry face. "Vic's a bit overprotective."

"Uh huh," Vic said, skeptically. "Anyway, I need to go, so—decision time. Ben, are you in or out?"

I considered repeating the same thing I'd said to Vic a week and a half ago—that if Mac started talking or acting in a way that seriously worried me, I would definitely be bringing him to the ER and letting professionals handle the situation. But I decided that that went without saying. "All right," I said. "I'll stay with Mac tonight until you're ready to pick him up."

Mac rewarded me with a big, sunny grin. " _Thank_ you," he said.

* * *

"So, have you ever been to the AGO before?" I asked Mac as we entered the museum proper.

He shook his head. "I've been wanting to check it out, though. Thanks for agreeing to this."

"You like art, then?" I asked. It wasn't something he'd mentioned before.

"Yeah." He gave a sort of quirked smile. "Before—I had this character I was playing for you. I called him 'Mac-the-underemployed-security-guard'. _He_ wasn't interested in art."

"Huh," I said. "What else was different about him?"

"Apart from the obvious? Mostly just social-class stuff. Like when you took me to lunch, and I pretended I'd never been in an expensive restaurant before."

I thought back to that day. At no point had Mac _said_ anything about it being his first time in a restaurant of that calibre; in fact, at the time, it had seemed to me that he was trying hard to downplay the extent to which he was unfamiliar with fine dining. He'd given me that impression through a series of subtle cues, which I'd read almost unconsciously. I'd thought I was seeing through his facade. It was rather disconcerting to look back and consider that he'd been _acting_ for me.

Apparently he was a very good actor.

Well, I supposed that was a helpful skill for a secret agent.

It was a somewhat worrying trait in a friend.

"Do you want to start with the European galleries?" I asked, since they were the closest to the entrance.

He nodded. "Yeah, I love the old masters."

We wandered into the first room. I hadn't been here for years—it might have been decades, actually. I liked art in principle, but it had never been a passion of mine, and I'd never studied it. I was surprised when Mac started giving me an enthusiastic, sotto voce commentary on the paintings we were seeing—pointing out interesting features of the paintings themselves, telling me biographical details about the artists, and putting them in a historical context. It was like having my own personal museum guide, and it definitely increased my appreciation of what I was seeing.

"Have you formally studied art history?" I asked him as we were strolling through into the next room.

"Sort of," he said. "It was one of the Tang godfather's passions, so he arranged for us to be tutored."

"Us," I repeated; "You and Li Ann?"

Mac nodded. "We never actually went to school. But we had a lot of tutors."

We started browsing around the next room, Mac once again going into storyteller mode. I was really enjoying myself, actually. In previous visits to this museum I'd quickly become numbed by the progression of one lovely painting after another; this time, slowing down and really learning about each one, I felt like I was properly experiencing the gallery for the first time.

It did occur to me that at this rate, in the two and a half hours that we had before closing, we were unlikely to even get off the first floor. But that was all right. Maybe we'd come back another night.

We came to a painting of a woman holding a small dog, and Mac gave a delighted gasp. "I didn't know they had a Rembrandt here!" he whispered. He gazed at the painting with a reverent expression.

He really seemed to be having a private moment with the painting, so I stepped back. He didn't say anything; he just kept looking at the Rembrandt. At first his expression was quite happy. His lips were slightly parted in an utterly unselfconscious grin. But then somehow, with very little actual change to his expression, the grin became sad.

I was about to say something—though I wasn't sure what—when suddenly he pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. "I have to go to the bathroom," he said, and walked away quickly without waiting for a reply.

I was startled enough to give him a head start, and his legs were much longer than mine. I would have had to literally run to catch up with him, and the decorum of the museum prevented me from actually breaking into a trot. I still had him in sight when he made it to the men's room, but he'd locked himself in a stall by the time I followed him in.

It was a busy evening at the museum; we weren't alone in the men's room. There was one man just finishing up at the urinals, another washing his hands, and I could see that one other stall was occupied besides Mac's.

Having spent most of my adult life as a closeted gay man, I was intensely uncomfortable with the idea of breaching social etiquette in a public washroom. One doesn't just _stand around_ in a men's room.

Vic had told me not to leave Mac alone. Up until now, Mac had seemed absolutely fine. But now _something_ was happening, and I had no idea what.

Well. Maybe he'd just had some intestinal discomfort. It happens.

I cleared my throat and rapped my knuckles lightly on the door of Mac's stall. "Mac, are you okay?" I asked.

No reply. But I could hear, faintly through the door, the kind of uneven, halting breaths that might accompany thoroughly-suppressed weeping.

Okay. My companion was having a breakdown in a public bathroom stall. I can't say it was a situation that had _never_ occurred before in my life, but it had certainly been many years since the last time. And that had been at the Rainbow Room, actually, and so in its way less intensely awkward than this.

"Well, I'll just ... wait for you out here, then," I said. I went to stand at the end of the row of sinks, pulled out the museum map I'd been carrying around, and tried to look absorbed in it.

Men came and went. I met a few odd looks with awkward, sheepish grins.

By the time ten minutes had passed, I was seriously wondering if I should call Vic or Li Ann. But they were off doing some kind of secret agent business, and I didn't want to risk interrupting them in a dangerous situation.

Anyway, whatever was happening with Mac, he was presumably not physically at risk in there.

About fifteen minutes into my washroom vigil, there came a moment when Mac and I were alone in the room. I knocked on the stall door again. "Mac, it's past seven. There's a pill you're supposed to take. Do you think you can open the door?"

At first there was no response, but then I heard the sound of toilet paper being pulled off the roll, followed by nose-blowing. Shortly afterwards, Mac emerged from the stall. He was still wearing his sunglasses, and his face looked splotchy. He had definitely spent the last quarter hour crying. He was standing straight now, though, and his voice sounded pretty steady when he said "Yeah, uh, gimme the pill."

I shook one tablet out of the bottle and handed it over. Mac popped it in his mouth and then went to the sink and ran a bit of water into his cupped hand to wash it down. After that, he tucked the sunglasses into his pocket and splashed water over his face a few times. I grabbed a couple of paper towels from the dispenser and handed them to him. He dried his face, and I caught a glimpse of his red-rimmed eyes before he slid the sunglasses back on.

"Sorry," he said.

"No need to apologize," I said carefully. "Would you like to find somewhere to sit down for a bit?"

"Ah, sure," he said.

I'd just spent a quarter of an hour staring at the museum map, so I led us confidently to the bistro. We got a table for two, and a server immediately approached to take our drinks orders.

I wanted a glass of wine, after all that, but I hesitated, remembering how Mac had been excluded from the drinking at supper on Saturday.

Mac must have interpreted my look correctly, because he said "Don't worry, get whatever you want, I don't mind. I'll have a ginger ale."

So I ordered a glass of the house red, and a plate of warm marinated olives.

"I can't drink right now because of the pills," Mac said as soon as the server left us.

"Oh. Right." I hadn't made the connection, because I hadn't known about the codeine when I'd noticed him abstaining on Saturday. I knew that he'd been using alcohol in some highly problematic ways in recent weeks; I'd assumed that the halt in drinking had to do with addressing that.

Come to think of it—"I'm a bit surprised that you were prescribed that medication," I mentioned. "I remember after you were shot, you complained about the doctor _not_ prescribing you any strong pain medication. Because of your history of substance abuse."

"Ah." Mac gave an uncomfortable grin. "Yeah. Well. That's why you're holding the pills."

I wasn't entirely comfortable with this situation. I wondered to what extent Vic was trying to manage Mac's issues without getting professional intervention. "Did you _tell_ the doctor about your history this time?" I asked.

"It was an Agency doctor. So yeah, she knew." Mac plucked the courtesy book of matches from the centrepiece, and lit one. "For the record," he added, staring at the flame, "I'm not a junkie. I never used heroin outside of prison."

"Codeine is an opiate," I pointed out, rather than addressing any of the several problems with that statement. "Same family of drugs."

"I know," Mac admitted. "Actually I tried to tell the doctor that I didn't need it. But there's this thing with broken ribs where if it hurts too much you take shallow breaths all the time, and you can get pneumonia. That happened to me once when I was younger. So ... rock and a hard place. She told me I had to take the codeine for a week. But Vic had to promise to dole it out to me one at a time on schedule." He blew the match out just before the flame reached his fingers, and dropped the blackened stick into the ashtray.

"Is that why you needed company for the evening?" I asked. I realized that nobody had actually _told_ me that Mac was still under suicide watch; I'd just assumed, from Vic's very specific instructions about not leaving him alone.

Mac shrugged. "Partly."

The server arrived to drop off our drinks and the olives. I took a sip of wine and ate an olive before I addressed the 'partly.' "Are your friends still concerned about your potential for self-harm?" I asked, which was about the most delicate way I could think of to phrase it.

"Maybe," he said. "I guess."

"And are they right to be?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm fine. Just, I haven't been alone since Vic found out I tried to kill myself, and I think Vic's worried about what I might do if I didn't have anybody around." He lit another match. The flame reflected in the dark lenses of his sunglasses.

"So ... Vic is the one who's making the decision that you shouldn't be left alone?" I asked, still probing for a better understanding of the whole situation.

"Vic and the Director, I think," he said. "She's the one who told Dobrinsky he had to help."

"Dobrinsky," I repeated. "Her right-hand man, who likes marching band music and not you."

Mac gave me a tight little grin and shook the second match out. "That's right," he said. "Well, better him than the Cleaners, anyway."

I blinked, slightly confused. "There was a possibility that your Director would have asked the cleaning staff to keep you company tonight? That does seem a little outside of their likely job description."

He snorted a quick laugh. "Not the cleaning _staff_. The Cleaners. They're assassins."

"Uh." I took a moment to run that sentence back through my head. "Did you say _assassins_?" I asked, dropping my voice to an appalled whisper.

"I mean, they're okay to hang out with in short bursts," Mac said. "But they're pretty weird."

"Assassins," I repeated. "Professional killers."

He gave me a look, like he wasn't sure what my problem was. "That's the definition, yeah."

"The other night, when you told me you _weren't_ assassins..."

He nodded. "It's a different job classification."

"The Canadian government employs _assassins_?" I whispered, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.

Mac shrugged. "Don't all governments?"

Okay. Breathe.

I remembered David's story—his investigations, the phone call, the dinner with the Prime Minister.

I remembered Vic's warnings.

The world didn't work the way I thought it did. And it was dangerous to ask too many questions.

With a deliberate effort, I backed away from the geopolitical issues raised by this conversation and went back to my original concern: figuring out how much trouble Mac was in, and whether I should be dragging him to the ER by the scruff of his neck. "So your boyfriend and your boss don't think it's safe for you to be alone, and they're making a care schedule for you which might involve assassins."

"Well..." he said. "Yeah."

"What about your _doctor_?"

Mac made a face and sipped at his ginger ale. "She gave me antidepressants. Which I'm taking now."

"Okay." Well, that was the first moderately reassuring thing that I'd heard all night. "So your doctor doesn't believe you need constant supervision? But Vic does?"

"I guess so," he said.

I frowned, and saw it reflected back to me in the lenses of his sunglasses. "Mac..." I said, "Would you mind taking off the dark glasses? I'm finding it uncomfortable having this conversation without seeing your eyes."

He hesitated, but then pulled them off—wincing a bit as he did, although the lighting in the bistro was really quite dim. The puffiness of his eyes had mostly subsided, although they were still a little pink-tinged at the edges.

"Mac, what happened back there?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" he said, and lit another match.

"Look, there's nothing wrong with having negative feelings," I said. "I don't want you to feel ashamed, or like you have to hide it. I understand that you've been struggling. You asked me to be with you tonight. I can be a better friend if I know what's going on in your head." I hesitated, and then added: "I could tell that you were crying in the bathroom," because while he must have realized that I'd noticed, as long as we didn't talk about it he might be maintaining some level of plausible deniability.

He stared down at the burning match until the flame nearly touched his fingers, then blew it out with a quick puff. "Rembrandt was my father's favourite painter," he said.

"Ah," I said. And then, because Mac's history was still a little fuzzy to me and I wanted to properly understand what he was trying to tell me here: "Your father the con artist? The one you ran away from?"

He shook his head. "No, I mean the Tang godfather. The man who raised me."

"I see," I said, although I didn't exactly. From Li Ann's and Mac's previous references to being 'adopted' into a Triad gang I hadn't quite picked up that they saw the crime lord as a literal parental figure, but that seemed to be what Mac was saying here. "Do you miss him?" I hazarded. It occurred to me that I didn't know much about the circumstances under which Mac and Li Ann had _left_ their crime family; Mac had breezed over the story very quickly indeed at dinner on Saturday.

"Yes," he said. His fingertips brushed an arm of his sunglasses, which were lying on the table in front of him, but he didn't pick them up. "It's been nearly two months since he died."

"Oh shit, I'm sorry Mac," I said, softening my voice. "I didn't realize." I quickly reassessed the bathroom crying jag. Maybe it hadn't been a depression symptom, but rather perfectly natural grief over the loss of a parent. "Had it been a long time since you'd last seen him?"

He shook his head. "I was there when he died."

"Oh," I said, a bit surprised because I had assumed that Mac and Li Ann wouldn't have had further contact with their former gang once they'd crossed over to the other side of the law. However shady the legal status of their nameless agency seemed to be, they did work for the government, and on the side of good as far as I could tell. "Well ... that's something to be thankful for, I guess. I'm sure he was glad to have you with him in his final moments."

Mac hunched his shoulders. "It would've been better if I could've saved him."

I cocked my head. "I'm sure you did everything you could." It was an empty platitude, but probably true. I'd tried for twenty years to convince my own father to stop smoking.

Mac fumbled with the matches, lit another one. "I could've moved faster. I ... _froze_ for a moment. I _should've_ moved faster."

_I_ froze for a moment. "Mac, how did you father die?" I asked—upon reflection, belatedly.

"In a hail of gunfire." He looked up at me, his lips quirking into a not-funny grin. "What, were you thinking cancer? Heart attack? He was a mob boss." The match, unattended, burned down to his fingertips. He dropped it to the glass tabletop with a startled flinch.

Well. Shit. I'd forgotten again, hadn't I? Mac was not a normal person.

But he was a _real_ person. And he was in pain. And he was telling me about a terrible experience that he'd had, not very long ago. "I am so sorry," I said again, for lack of anything more appropriate. "That sounds ... terrifying. And you were there?"

A quick nod. "Li Ann and I got there just as Chow and his buddies opened fire. We were across the street, and we hadn't been expecting trouble. They had automatic weapons; we had handguns." He picked up his ginger ale and drained it. When he put the glass down, he didn't let go of it. "We made it to Father's side before he died," he added, spinning the glass slowly between his fingers. "His last words were _family_ , and _forgiveness_."

"It sounds," I said gently, "like in his last moments he wanted to make peace with you." Actually I had no fucking idea what the significance of the gangster's last words had been, but Mac looked absolutely shattered, and at least what I'd said sounded _nice_.

But Mac shook his head. "He wanted me and Li Ann and Michael to forgive each other. To be a family again."

"Michael?" I said, searching my mental Cliff's Notes frantically.

"He was there too. Father died in his arms."

_Michael._ I was able to place the name as soon as I imagined it in Vic's voice, with a bit of a snarl. In the story that I'd pieced together (or more accurately, been _fed_ ) while Mac and Li Ann were undercover, Michael was Mac's ex. They'd dated in secret in Hong Kong; Li Ann had known, but nobody else had. He'd come back to town recently, had some kind of altercation with Mac in which Mac had ended up with a concussion, and then died shortly afterwards in a car crash—triggering Mac's recent downward spiral, which Vic had been desperately trying to pull him out of.

None of that fit particularly well with what Mac had just told me now. And when Mac had been undercover, he certainly _hadn't_ told me that he'd recently lost his adoptive father to mob violence. So clearly, my knowledge of recent events in Mac's life had some serious gaps—and filling them in might help me understand what was actually going on with him right now.

"Who's Michael?" I asked, for simplicity.

"My brother," Mac said.

"Oh." I wondered if we were even talking about the same person. "Not your ex, then."

"Well, that too." He met my sharp, startled look with a rueful smirk. "I mean, we weren't _biological_ brothers. He was the godfather's natural-born son. He was nineteen when the godfather adopted me. You're not going to freak out about the statutory rape, are you? Vic always kind of chokes on that bit."

Okay, Mac was pushing me into a particular role here: letting him say unhealthy things that Vic, apparently, didn't tolerate. I decided not to push back for the moment, but to let him tell me the story the way he wanted to. "I understand that a fourteen-year-old might be happy to engage in a relationship with an older partner," I said instead, carefully not actually condoning or condemning the idea. "When you were undercover, you told me that Michael had recently died in a car crash. Did that actually happen?"

Mac nodded. "A week before Christmas. A couple of weeks after Father died."

"Shit," I said. "I'm so sorry, Mac."

He just lit another match and watched it burn.

"You also told me that he hurt you—that he gave you a concussion," I mentioned, because that did seem like an important puzzle piece.

There was a pause before Mac could respond—the server was approaching our table to see if we wanted our drinks refilled. We both said yes, and I ordered some fries. It seemed like we might be here for a while.

"He tried to kill me," Mac said when the server left. "And Li Ann. But she killed him instead."

We were both keeping our voices very low. I hoped to God nobody at the next tables was able to make out what we were saying.

"What?" I said. "I thought you said it was a car crash."

"Well, he wouldn't have crashed the car if she hadn't been shooting at him." He lit another match—it was the last one in the book. "And she wouldn't have been shooting at him if he hadn't been trying to run her over with the car. Of course, I only heard about this secondhand. I was unconscious at the time, lying right where Michael had left me, in a building that was rigged to explode." The flame was reaching the end of the match, but he just stared at it. "Vic and Li Ann ran in and pulled me out. They could've died. We made it out about half a second before the whole place went up." The match flame reached his fingertips and I saw him wince, but he didn't let go; he just squeezed his fingers together. A moment later, the flame flickered out. He dropped the blackened remains of the match and stuck his fingers in his mouth.

How the hell was I supposed to respond to this? I grew up on Bathurst Street. I loved my parents. I got married a little too young, I went to law school, I worked my way up through a firm. The single most dramatic event of my life was coming out at age thirty-five, but even that went pretty smoothly, all things considered. My wife was understandably angry, but my mother didn't stumble in her love for me and my father was already three years dead.

Well. I'd been shot at in a night club last week. And Mac had pushed me out of the way, and taken the bullet for me.

During my silence, the server arrived again with our refills and fries.

As soon as the server left, Mac reached across the table and snatched my wineglass, and drained it.

I sighed, suddenly feeling immensely weary. "I really wish you hadn't done that."

He pushed the empty glass back towards me. "Sorry," he said. "I'll buy you another one."

"You know that's not what I mean." I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling my sandpaper stubble. "Up until now you hadn't actually _done_ anything self-destructive, so I was willing to play along with Vic's do-it-yourself psychiatric care plan. But now you're mixing alcohol and opiates. And Vic told me that you nearly killed yourself with alcohol poisoning a few weeks ago, possibly deliberately. So have some fries, and then we're going to the hospital."

"It was one glass of wine," Mac said. "It's not a big deal."

"It is a big deal," I countered, "because of your history. And because you just _decided_ to do that, when you knew you shouldn't be drinking."

"We were talking about Michael," he said, like that was a sufficient explanation.

"Mac," I said, "I know that Vic cares about you a lot, and that he wants to _take_ care of you. But he's your boyfriend, not your doctor, and it is increasingly clear to me that you are not getting the help that you need."

Mac shook his head. "I can't go to the hospital."

"I'm sorry, but this isn't a discussion," I said. I thought back to the crisis-intervention training which I had never actually received, but had heard about from some friends who had done it. "I am going to bring you to the hospital."

"I don't mean I _won't_ go to the hospital," Mac said. "I mean I literally _can't_. You could take me there, and leave me there, but the Director would send somebody for me in an hour or two at most. Think about it. She can't have me drugged up in a public psych ward, spilling operational details and state secrets all over the orderlies." He paused to eat a french fry. "Best case scenario, she sends in Dobrinsky to haul me away to the Agency's own facility. Worst case scenario, she cuts her losses and sends in the Cleaners."

Well, here was an appalling aspect of secret-agent-hood that I hadn't previously considered. "The _assassins_?"

"Worst-case scenario," Mac reiterated with a shrug. "I _think_ she likes me enough to give me a another chance to straighten myself out. She seemed pretty pleased with me for passing her Colombian drug cartel test on Friday."

"Colombian drug cartel _test_?" I repeated, confused.

"Yeah, she set the cartel guys loose in the Agency corridors and then she made me talk about Michael and she threatened to take Vic away from me. She wanted to see if I could pull out of a psychological breakdown and function as an agent if Vic and Li Ann were in danger. The answer was yes." He frowned. "Shit, I probably shouldn't have told you most of that. Am I drunk? I only had one glass of wine."

"On top of 60 mg of codeine," I reminded him. Holy shit, that story was appalling if taken literally. But I couldn't dwell on it; I needed to do something about Mac right now. "Okay, look, if you can't go to a public hospital, I'll take you to your doctor at your Agency."

Mac half-snorted a laugh. "I can't tell you where the Agency _is_. It's a _secret_."

"Okay, then I'm calling Vic," I decided, pulling out my phone. Presumably if he were in the middle of something really dangerous, he'd have his phone on silent, right?

Mac's eyes widened. "No, wait, fuck. Don't. Please."

But the phone was already ringing.

"Hello?" Vic answered. "Ben?"

Across from me, Mac folded his arms on the table and lowered his head onto them, making a very faint moaning noise.

"Yes. Hi. Sorry to disturb you at work. But I'm afraid I'm not comfortable with being responsible for Mac's safety tonight. He's convinced me that going to the ER isn't feasible, but I really think that he should be with his doctor. Do you know how to get in touch with her?"

"Fuck," Vic said. "What did he do? Is he okay? Where are you? Is he with you?"

"We're in the bistro at the AGO," I said. "He's been saying and doing some fairly concerning things, and just now he rather suddenly decided to drink a glass of wine."

"Is he, um, coherent? Can I talk to him?"

"Hang on," I said, and held out the phone towards Mac. "Vic would like to talk to you."

Mac sat up but didn't reach for the phone; rather, he recoiled from it, and shook his head.

I pressed the phone to my own ear again. "Ah, he doesn't seem to want to talk right now. Vic, how do I get in touch with his doctor?"

"Just a second," Vic said, and then I heard some muffled background talk; I thought I recognized Li Ann's voice, along with Vic's, and a second female voice that was unfamiliar to me. "Okay," Vic said, speaking into the phone again. "Li Ann and Jackie can handle things here. I'll come get Mac. I should be there in fifteen minutes." He ended the call.

Well, that wasn't exactly the outcome I'd been aiming for. I resolved that when Vic arrived, I'd make him promise to reach out to Mac's doctor, rather than trying to handle this on his own.

Other than that, I felt pretty helpless. It was dawning on me that Mac, Vic and Li Ann were truly disconnected from the normal support structures of Canadian society.

I explained to Mac that Vic was coming to get him; Mac accepted that without protest. I paid our bill at the bistro, and we headed back to the atrium to pick up our things from the coat check. Mac was subdued, and walking carefully; I could tell that the alcohol-and-codeine combo was affecting him. Once we had our coats, he sank onto one of the benches near the entrance. I noticed with concern that he was blinking slowly, and swaying a little. "Sleepy?" I asked.

He nodded.

It seemed like he was in some danger of falling off the bench, so I sat down next to him. I hesitated a little over which side to put myself on. I knew he had the healing gunshot wound on his right side—but during the evening, whenever he'd needed to cough he'd protectively clutched his left side, so I figured that's where the broken rib was. I decided to sit on his right. I put an arm loosely around his waist, just to make sure he couldn't suddenly topple backwards.

He sighed. "Sorry," he said. "I wanted tonight to be fun for you."

"Don't worry about it," I said. "Anyway, the first part was fun."

After that, I think he dozed, leaning against me.

It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I'd held someone for longer than a quick hug. Years, in fact.

I missed it.

What was I doing with my life?

* * *

Vic arrived a few minutes later. I saw him looking around the atrium with a worried expression, which lightened a little when he saw us.

"Hi," he said, coming over.

Mac roused himself and sat up at the sound of Vic's voice. "Hey," he said. He sounded happy to see Vic, although I remembered that he hadn't wanted me to call him in the first place.

Vic helped Mac to his feet, with a firm grasp on both of his forearms. Then he gave him a careful hug. "My truck's parked just outside," he said. "I'm going to take you home."

"What about the stake-out?" Mac asked.

"The dealer showed up early, and we got him. Case closed. Li Ann and Jackie are just doing some cleanup."

"Drugs bust?" I asked, falling in behind them as they headed for the entrance.

Vic glanced back with a wry grin. "Nah. Exotic animals. When I left, Li Ann and Jackie were chasing goats around the warehouse. There were still six unaccounted for."

"Goats aren't exotic," I mentioned, puzzled.

"Well, they were genetically engineered to produce spider silk in their milk." Vic shrugged. "Why anyone would want to breed, or steal, spider-goats, I do not know. That's above my pay grade. But anyway, we caught the guy."

We drew even with a red Dodge Ram pickup truck. Vic unlocked the passenger side door, and gave Mac a hand stepping up inside.

"Could I talk to you for a moment?" I asked Vic.

He nodded, and pushed the door of the truck shut. Inside, Mac leaned back against the headrest and shut his eyes. Vic backed a few paces away from the truck and turned to me, tucking his hands in his pockets—he wasn't wearing gloves. "So," he said. "What exactly happened?"

I gathered my thoughts. I wanted to talk to Vic about what was going to happen _next_ , but I supposed that I owed him a full accounting first. "Everything was fine," I said, "until Mac saw a painting that reminded him of his father."

"Er," said Vic, "Which father?"

I blinked in momentary confusion, but then realized it was a reasonable question. "The crime lord," I clarified. "So then he locked himself in a bathroom stall for a quarter of an hour."

"Well..." Vic said. "Okay. Could've been worse. He came out on his own?"

"He came out when I reminded him it was time for his painkiller dose," I said. "Oh, speaking of which—" I pulled the bottle out of my own pocket and handed it over to Vic. "So then we went down to the bistro, and I invited him to talk about it."

"Okay," Vic said, looking wary. "How'd that go?"

I sucked in a breath of cold winter air. "Whew. Well, he told me about seeing his father gunned down. And about his dying words, which were a wish for a reconciliation between Mac and Li Ann and his actual son, Michael—who was apparently Mac's secret lover of many years, besides being his adoptive older brother. And then apparently two weeks later Michael tried to _kill_ Mac and Li Ann, but Li Ann killed him instead, and the three of you came within a hair's breadth of getting blown up?"

"Jesus," Vic said, grimacing. "They never mentioned that thing about the godfather's final wish to me." He hunched his shoulders. "So he told you all that, huh. Without ending up under the table?"

" _Under_ the table?" I repeated.

"It happens. He's, ah, not great at talking about the shit that's happened to him without falling apart. He's working on it. The night probably would've gone better if you hadn't asked him about that stuff."

"Hm," I said. "Well, you didn't mention that ahead of time."

"I didn't expect it to come up. He's pretty good at compartmentalizing. And he knows how to deflect questions that he doesn't want to answer. And he wouldn't confide in someone he didn't feel safe with." He made a rueful face. "Apparently he trusts you."

"I'm not sure it was a matter of trust," I demurred, cautiously. "I think he's implicitly asking for help."

"He's _getting_ help," Vic said, sounding slightly defensive. "Look, you don't know him very well, but—if he actually talked to you about that stuff? About Michael? And _didn't_ end up drinking himself senseless or literally quivering in a ball under the table? That's a big deal. That's way ahead of where he was two weeks ago."

"Well, as to the drinking," I pointed out, "there was only one glass of wine on the table, and he drank it."

"Okay, that's not great," Vic conceded.

"On top of a codeine prescription, it's _very_ not great. Particularly in light of what you told me about his previous dangerous drinking patterns. Which is why I wanted to take him to the hospital."

Vic looked dismayed. "No, he _can't_ go to the hospital for psych issues."

I sighed. "Yes, well, he also explained that. And I can see the logic." Although it was troubling as hell. "Which is why I'd like you to get in touch with his doctor at your Agency tonight. Is that possible?"

Vic shook his head. "No, that's not a good idea."

"Mac mentioned that the Agency has its own medical facilities," I pressed on. "He thought he'd end up being transferred there if I took him to a city hospital." That, or he'd be terminated—but that was such an over-the-top suggestion that I couldn't quite bring myself to concede it as an actual possibility.

"No," Vic said again, emphatically. "We already talked about that. We aren't going to let Mac end up there."

"We who?" I asked. "You and Mac?"

"Me and Li Ann," Vic said.

"Vic," I said gently, "I know that you love Mac. And I know that you want to help him. But sometimes love isn't enough. You're worried for his safety. After spending a few hours with him tonight, I think you're right to be. But setting up a rotating watch of his friends and coworkers isn't going to solve his underlying issues, whatever they are, and it's not fair to everybody else to ask them to shoulder that responsibility. Mac needs professional help."

Vic looked at me grimly for a moment or two. I could see the muscles at the side of his jaw twitching. Then he shook his head. "Sorry, Ben, but you don't understand. If we were normal people, you'd be right. But this is the Agency we're talking about. The psych department likes to dabble in experimental chemical mind-control. No fucking way am I letting them get their clutches on Mac."

"Wait." _Experimental mind-control._ That rang a bell. "Are you talking about the droogs?"

"How did you know about the droogs?" Vic asked, looking startled.

"David found Oswald's articles," I said.

Vic's forehead crinkled. "I thought those were all deleted."

"It's very hard to make anything disappear permanently on the internet," I said, which was actually just a quote from Padma in IT—not like I knew anything about it. "So that stuff about the droogs was _real_?"

"Unfortunately," Vic winced.

"And your Agency _made_ them?"

Another wince.

"And you, personally, went to Oswald's apartment to intimidate him into dropping the story?"

"Actually, we went to _her_ apartment to find out what she knew about the droogs, when we were investigating them. We didn't know about the Agency connection at that point. It was sort of complicated." Vic looked deeply uncomfortable. "Look, I really can't talk to you about this without risking getting one or both of us brain-wiped, and I'm _not_ kidding or speaking metaphorically. So could you just drop it? Please?"

Fucking hell. Every time I thought I'd learned the most horrifying possible thing about the Agency...

"Okay," I said weakly. "I think I'm starting to understand why you're so determined to look after Mac on your own. Shit, Vic. I am so sorry that you're all stuck in this situation. But what the hell do you think you're going to _do_? You can't supervise him twenty-four hours a day forever."

He hunched in on himself. "Look, I'm sorry we got you involved. It was too much to ask. We won't do it again."

"That's not what I'm saying." Wasn't it? I'd certainly felt, at times tonight, that I was being asked to play an inappropriate role in Mac's life. But that was before I'd realized quite how _trapped_ my secret agents were. "He saved my life last week," I reminded Vic, and myself. "He literally threw himself in front of a bullet for me. So no, spending a few hours together when I'm free and he needs company isn't too much to ask. But what I meant was, what is your actual plan?"

"Well, um, I've been reading some psychology books," Vic said, looking a little sheepish. "And Mac's been practising meditation. We all have, actually."

"Meditation?"

The skepticism must've shown on my face, because Vic immediately insisted, "It's not flaky. I mean, that was my first reaction too, but Mac and Li Ann used to do it back in Hong Kong, and they learned from this Tibetan monk who survived the Chinese occupation, and Mac thought it would help him. And then it turned out that the PTSD book also said that meditation could be helpful, so I guess he was on to something."

"PTSD," I repeated. "Is that his actual diagnosis?"

Vic nodded. "Yeah."

Well, that wasn't a shock considering what he'd told me about his background. "Okay," I said. "Well, that is something that he could, in theory, get over. But it's not going to happen quickly. And if you're really worried that he's potentially suicidal, in the meantime—how on earth are you planning to keep him safe?"

"I don't actually think he's suicidal," Vic said. "I think he _was_ , earlier in the month. He was spinning out after Michael came back, and none of us realized it. He'd gone past his ability to cope. But things are different now."

"But you still think he needs constant supervision," I pointed out.

"Well, constant _company_ ," Vic said. "He's been ... fragile. He used to keep his PTSD pretty firmly tamped down, so it was only coming out in the nightmares, but since he started talking to me and Li Ann about it, he's had to deal with processing those memories in his daily life. And he's been having a lot of flashbacks, and breakdowns. But we're all pretty sure it's part of the healing process. He used to keep it all suppressed and then drink to black out when he couldn't handle it anymore. So ... he's not doing that anymore. But it's only been a couple of weeks. And he _has_ been doing really well, and he hasn't done anything to hurt himself."

Oy vey, this was a lot for them to be handling on their own. "He had that drink tonight," I reminded Vic, because it was still worrying me. "And in the bistro, he was playing with matches—letting them burn down to his fingers. It might've just been a fidget, but at the end he scorched his fingertips a bit, and it did look like he did it on purpose."

"He is pretty fidgety," Vic said, but he shot a concerned glance in Mac's direction. Mac's head was leaning against the truck's window, flattening a patch of his hair and the side of his cheek. He looked fast asleep.

"And the drink?" I said.

Vic sighed. "Yeah, that's really not good. But you were talking about Michael."

"That's what Mac said, too," I remembered. "Like that was all the justification he needed for a relapse into substance abuse."

Vic kind of winced at that. "I wouldn't say _justification_. Maybe _explanation_."

"Okay, what was the deal with Michael?" I asked. He seemed to be pretty central to Mac's story, but nobody had actually told me very much about him yet.

"Besides the fact that he tried to kill Mac and Li Ann? He was a fucking monster. A sociopath."

Well, that was strong language. "Mac indicated that you didn't approve of the fact that their relationship started when Mac was underage," I mentioned, carefully.

Vic grimaced. "Did he. Well, would _you_ approve of that?"

"Definitely not," I said. "But at the time, I thought it was better to just let Mac tell me his story."

"Okay, here's what you need to know about Michael, if you're going to be talking to Mac about him and trying _not_ to trigger a complete breakdown," Vic said tightly. "They met when Mac was fourteen and living on the street. One day Mac got stabbed; Michael brought him to the hospital, and then brought him home and convinced his father to adopt him, so Mac thinks he owes Michael for saving his life."

"Okay, I can understand that," I said. "Whereas you see that Michael was engaging in statutory rape." Mac had mentioned Vic's anger about that.

Vic's scowl only got darker. "Well, yes. But also the regular kind of rape. And he physically abused Mac, for the whole ten years they were together. _And_ they had this thing with alcohol, where Michael maintained emotional control over Mac by only letting Mac talk about his feelings and his fucked-up past after Michael got him drunk. Because don't forget, Mac was fucked up _before_ he met Michael—in the six months before he met Michael, his mother had been gunned down in front of him, his father had abandoned him, and he'd been living on the street for months. He was _thirteen_ when all that happened. And even before _that_ his life was awful. His mother was a criminal, and she put Mac in dangerous situations with dangerous people, and some of them did bad things to him."

"Fucking hell," I said, softly. I did not have words to respond to that.

"But the _most_ fucked-up thing about Mac's relationship with Michael," Vic said, "is that Mac will tell you that Michael loved him, and protected him."

"That's a fairly typical dynamic in an abusive relationship," I mentioned. Not much else about Mac's life was typical—but that was, unfortunately.

" _I_ know that," Vic said. "And Mac ... _sort of_ understands that Michael abused him. I mean, he'll acknowledge it. But then he'll turn around and start making excuses for Michael. He'll say it was 'complicated'." Vic pulled one of his hands out of his pocket and pinched the bridge of his nose in a weary gesture. "I mean, it _was_ complicated. Just a few days ago, Mac filled in some more details about what he'd _meant_ when he told us that Michael hurt him to protect him. Apparently Michael beat him up when he made suicide threats."

"Oy vey," I said. "That's ... disturbing. Vic, _has_ Mac been making suicide threats?"

"No," Vic said. And then hesitated, and backtracked: "Not exactly."

"What was the context for him sharing that piece of history with you?"

"It was on Sunday, after our evening meditation," Vic said. "A lot of stuff comes up after meditation. Mac was in a lot of pain from the broken rib, so that was on his mind, and he ended up thinking about the time Michael broke his ribs when he was fifteen. So he told us about that. And apparently that was one of those times—when Michael had been responding to Mac's threats to hurt himself, by hurting him." Vic's shoulders sagged. He took a step back towards the truck, and pressed his hand against the passenger-side window opposite the place where Mac's cheek was pressed against the glass. "Ben, I don't know what I'm doing," he said quietly. "Mac's life has been so ... _awful_. And now he trusts me, but I'm constantly afraid that I'm going to do the wrong thing and fuck him up worse. And he's so used to Michael fucking him up, he won't even notice. I hurt him the first time we had sex. I didn't know that I was, and he didn't tell me, and then he _fainted_ afterwards."

"Oh." I winced. "He didn't tell you about lube?"

Vic sniffled, which was when I realized that he'd started crying. But then he gave me an embarrassed grin through the tears. "No, that wasn't the problem. He explained about lube, and about warming up with your fingers."

"Okay ... what was the problem, then?"

"The gunshot wound. It reopened. There was bleeding, and he passed out."

"There was that much bleeding?" I asked, appalled.

"Well, no. Just a little. He's ridiculously squeamish."

"Okay." I moved closer so that I could put a hand on his shoulder. "Vic, that was a _mishap_. You didn't really hurt him."

"He's squeamish," Vic said, looking through the window at Mac, "because he was traumatized by crawling through a giant pool of his mother's blood and bits of her skull and brain, to reach her corpse, after she was gunned down in front of him when he was thirteen."

"Fuck." I squeezed Vic's shoulder. "Okay, listen." Pep talk time. Vic clearly needed it. "Michael was abusive. I never met the guy, but I think I know the type. He hurt Mac _on purpose_. You are kind, and gentle, and empathetic. You are good for Mac. I can't guarantee that he's going to be okay, but I am certain that he's more _likely_ to be okay now that he's got you looking out for him."

Inside the truck, Mac stirred, sat up, and blinked. Maybe he'd felt the glass warming where Vic's hand had been pressed against it. He looked muzzily out at us, and then opened the door. "How long have you guys been standing out there?" he said, a bit petulantly. "I'm _freezing_."

"Sorry," Vic said, and handed him the keys. "Turn on the heater. I'll be right there."

Mac pulled the door shut again, and then I heard the engine turning over.

Vic turned to me, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. "Sorry," he said again. "I shouldn't have unloaded all that on you."

"No, I'm glad you did," I said. It was true, although at the same time I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. "I do want to be a friend to Mac, so it's better that I know those things." I hesitated, then added, "And you can call me again for help if you need to—if Mac needs company _or_ supervision. I understand that your options are limited."

"Thanks," Vic said. He swiped his eyes with the back of his left hand, and then offered me a firm handshake with his right. "I appreciate it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, dear reader! I just thought that you might like to know: the spider-goats [are real](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/spider-goats-display-angers-ottawa-professor-1.1137229). I saw them myself, in Ottawa!


	4. Chapter 4

"So, how are your secret agents doing?" David asked me after basketball, Saturday morning. We'd been playing pick-up five-on-five with some other guys, but now it was just the two of us on the bleachers, drinking Gatorade and towelling off our sweat and looking very manly indeed.

"Oh, they're a hot mess." I slung the towel over my shoulders. "How's your political career?"

"Getting started," David said, in a tone of bemused wonderment. "The mystery woman brought me to a Liberal party cocktail hour and handed me around. I talked _policy_ with the Minister of Finance. It was _exhilarating_."

"Well, congratulations," I told him, meaning it. "Be careful of the mystery woman, though. She apparently has assassins reporting to her directly."

David raised an eyebrow. "So noted." He took a swig of blue Gatorade. "Care to expand upon the theme of your hot, messy secret agents?"

"Hm," I said. "I shouldn't joke about it. They have _horrific_ life stories."

"Didn't the mystery woman tell us that the first night in the limo?" David said, and then quoted from memory, imitating the Director's detached, ironic tones: " _Well-adjusted people with unproblematic histories do not end up working as covert field agents for shadowy government organizations._ "

I nodded in rueful agreement. "Example: Mac. He has a roaring case of PTSD, and they're all coping with it the best they can, but he can't be admitted to a regular psych ward because he's a fucking _secret agent_ , and they don't want him going anywhere near their in-house services for fear he'll end up like one of your droogs."

David looked surprised. "They talked to you about the droogs?"

"Vic did," I said. "Oh, and by the way, we're both sexist pigs. Oswald is a woman."

"Huh," David said. "Good for her. So ... Mac was the tall, hot, suicidal one, right? How's he doing?"

"Well, they tapped me on Wednesday to be his guardian for the evening, and I flubbed it," I said. "We went to the AGO. The first hour was lovely, but then things went downhill fast. I ended up calling Vic for an early pickup after I'd failed to prevent Mac from mixing alcohol and opiates."

"Oof," David said, with a sympathetic wince. "Are you sure you want to be getting involved in this?"

"Not at all," I confessed. "But not because of Mac's dysfunction. I mean, as far as that goes, I can set boundaries. I _did_ on Wednesday, when Mac started pushing too hard and stealing my wine. But ... oy vey, their _Agency_ scares the hell out of me. And the level of violence in their lives is incredible. Mac and Li Ann speak very casually about killing people. Vic is a bit more reticent about that—at least, he's the only one who seems to notice that it might bother _me_. Which makes sense, I suppose—he used to be a cop, and it sounds like prior to his recruitment by the shadowy government agency, he had a _fairly_ normal life. Mac and Li Ann, on the other hand, spent their adolescence under the care of a Triad crime lord. Try to imagine that."

"Well, I actually have been acquainted with gang members before," David said with a wry look. "Remember, I'm from a bad neighbourhood."

"Hm," I said. "Street gangs, though. Right? Not organized crime."

"One shades into the other," he said. "But it's true, I shouldn't exaggerate my experience. As a teenager, I occasionally had conversational brushes with guys who wore colours and talked big. And I had a secret crush for a while on a boy who later came to a bad end. But overall, drama club and debate team were quite effective at keeping me out of all that."

"Let's hear it for drama club and debate team," I said, and squeezed his shoulder.

"So are you going to keep seeing your secret agents?" he asked me.

"I _should_ probably run for the hills," I said. "But I think they really need a friend outside of their crazy world. And I _like_ them. And ... it's quite fucking exciting, isn't it? Like I've suddenly stepped into a James Bond movie."

"I hear you," David said. "I'm seeing the mystery woman again next week." He tapped his Gatorade bottle against mine as though making a toast. "To excitement. Let's just hope we don't get ourselves killed."

"L'Chaim," I murmured, and sipped my Gatorade.


	5. Chapter 5

I didn't hear from the agents again until Thursday afternoon, when I got another call from Mac.

"Hi," he said. "Want to go see the Russian Ballet do Carmina Burana tonight? Li Ann and I were going to go, but it turns out she has to work."

"That sounds like fun," I said, cautiously. "But I would like to clarify. Are you asking me as a friend, or are you looking for someone to supervise you?"

"Ah..." he hesitated, "does your answer change depending on what I say?"

Which already implied the answer to my question. "No," I said (and decided), "I'd love to go to the ballet with you. But I'd like to talk to Vic first, if that's all right." I felt a little uneasy about making that request—worried that I'd be reinforcing the dynamic they had going wherein Vic was the one who was responsible for Mac's safety—but I realized that I had a better shot at finding out what to expect tonight from Vic than from Mac. "Is he there with you?"

"No, I'm at the Agency," Mac said. "Vic's down at the port. You can call him, if you want."

"Oh, you're back at work already?" I was a bit surprised, but actually that was a promising sign in terms of Mac's progress and stability.

"Huh? Oh, I didn't get any time off for the broken rib. I just can't go out in the field for another two weeks or so. I'm reviewing cold case records with Nathan. It _sucks_."

"Nathan?"

"The librarian." Then the sound got distant, like Mac was holding the phone at arm's length. "Hey Nathan, say hi to Ben."

"H-h-hello," said an unfamiliar voice in the background.

"So I'll pick you up at your place at quarter past seven?" Mac said, speaking directly into the phone again.

"Ah, I haven't told you where I live," I pointed out. I wasn't planning to, either.

"Oh, that's okay," Mac said breezily. "Nathan'll give me your address." He ended the call.

Eep.

Shadowy government agency. Right. Shit.

I shuddered a little, reflexively, and then placed the call to Vic.

"Hello?" he said. I could hear gulls crying in the background, and a distant foghorn.

"Vic," I said, "It's Benjamin. I just had a call from Mac."

"Oh, about the ballet, right? He said he was going to ask you."

"Yes," I said. "Well, I accepted the invitation. But I wanted to check in with you about some details—considering I got a bit blindsided last time. How's he doing?"

"Pretty good," Vic said. He sounded a lot more chipper himself than he had last week, which was probably a good sign. "He's off the codeine now, so you don't have to worry about that. And he hasn't had a real daytime breakdown since ... wow, uh, last week, actually."

"Daytime?" I repeated.

"Yeah, well, nights are a whole other thing," Vic said. "He has night terrors. It's a PTSD thing. But I guess that's been happening since he was a kid, so ... according to him, it's not a big deal."

"Okay," I said. "Well, I'm not going to be spending the night with him. Er—right? Actually, how late are you working tonight? And _am_ I going to need to stay with him the whole time until you're free?"

"We're expecting the sub to dock around ten," Vic said. "So I should be able to pick him up before midnight. But is it okay if things run a bit later? You never know, with arms dealers."

"I can cope with the occasional late night," I said. I wasn't _that_ old. "So I do take it, then, that you still feel he needs constant surveillance."

"Well..." Vic said, "we're starting to ease up on that. He's had some time alone at work during the day this week, and it's been fine. But I don't like the idea of him being completely off on his own, in the evening. There's just too much potential for him to go off the rails without anybody there to notice."

I frowned, recalling my own first-hand experience of him going off the rails last week. "There's a bit of a problem here, Vic. If Mac does decide to engage in self-destructive behaviour, I have very little capacity to stop him. I'm certainly not capable of physically restraining him in any way. And I've noticed that he has a tendency to push boundaries. If he knows that I _can't_ do anything to stop him from hurting himself, I'm worried that my presence alone won't be sufficient disincentive. Under ... _ordinary_ circumstances, if I were accompanying a friend in crisis, I'd have 911 as an ultimate fallback. I understand that that isn't a great option, in Mac's case. But I need to have _some_ kind of potential for intervention if he starts behaving in a way that I'm not prepared to deal with."

"Okay," Vic said. "I see your point. Ah, can you wait a few minutes? While I make some calls?"

"Certainly," I said.

Vic called me back about twenty minutes later. "I'm going to give you Dobrinsky's number," he said. "If Mac starts acting up, you can call him. He'll come and deal with it."

"The famous Dobrinsky," I murmured, and took the number down. "And he'll be available this evening? You've warned him about the possibility?"

"Yeah," Vic said. "And I've warned Mac, too. So he really shouldn't give you any trouble. He definitely won't want you to call Dobrinsky. Just ... try to avoid talking about Michael, okay?"

* * *

The ballet was exquisite. The costumes and sets were fabulous, the music was beautiful, and the dancers—oh my. Such breathtaking athleticism and grace.

Afterwards, Mac suggested settling in at a pub to wait for Vic's call, but remembering the wine incident last week, I said that I'd prefer to go to a coffee shop. I knew of a nice café in the Village that was open quite late.

It was only about a kilometre from the performing arts centre to the café, so we decided to walk. It was a nice night, for early February—clear, and only a little below zero. We chatted about the performance we'd just seen; Mac had enjoyed it, too, though he expressed some regret that Li Ann hadn't been able to see it. "The tickets were her idea," he mentioned. "Now that we're dating again, she thought it would be nice to go out together once in a while."

"Wait," I said, a bit confused. "You and _Li Ann_ are dating?"

"Sort of," he said. "Well—I mean _yes_. But without sex."

"Okay," I said. Well, that was a little unusual, but it was hardly the first unorthodox arrangement I'd encountered in the past decade. "Dating _again_ , you said?"

He nodded, and stopped to fish some change out of his pocket to put in a panhandler's cup. "Yeah, we were together in Hong Kong. _With_ sex, in that case. Which was nice, but I guess she doesn't want that anymore."

I blinked, feeling caught a bit off guard. "Not to sound prudish, but don't you think of each other as siblings?"

Mac shrugged. "Sure. And? I was fucking Michael, too."

 _Don't talk about Michael,_ Vic had said. Right. Was Mac idly reminiscing, or pushing? I decided to just gently steer the conversation away from that disaster-in-waiting. "Actually, it's not so strange that you and Li Ann would experience attraction," I said. "You were teenagers when you met, right?"

"I was fourteen, she was twelve," he said. "We didn't start having sex until she was almost twenty, though."

"Okay," I nodded. "Have you heard about the Westermarck Hypothesis?"

He shook his head. "What's that?"

"It's a theory that early childhood proximity is what prevents sexual attraction between siblings," I said. "There was a big study of kids raised on Israeli kibbutzim—do you know what those are?"

He nodded. "The collective farms, right?"

"Right," I confirmed. "So, the kids raised together in peer groups never got married later— _except_ for the ones who arrived after the age of six. So the theory says that the imprinting happens under the age of six. And, well, you and Li Ann were much older than that when you met."

"Wow," Mac said. "Science, huh." He stopped short suddenly, and I went a couple of steps beyond him before I realized, and looked back.

He'd turned towards a homeless man who was sleeping huddled in several layers of blankets, in a blocked-up doorway. The man had a battered cardboard sign propped up on his lap: _Need $5 for shellter tonite._

Mac pulled out his wallet, extracted a five dollar bill, and said "Hey, buddy." The man didn't wake up, so then Mac reached over and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. At that point the man woke up with a start, flinching. Mac backed off half a step and waved the bill. "Here, man," he said. "Five bucks. Get yourself a warm place to sleep."

The man's wrinkled face brightened, and he took the bill with a shaking, gnarled hand. "Thanks," he said, beaming at Mac. "God bless you."

"Hm, yeah, that's not likely," Mac said, sort of under his breath, and turned back towards me. He headed down the sidewalk again without looking back. I did glance over my shoulder; I saw the man bundling up his blankets.

We walked in silence for maybe twenty seconds. I broke it first. "I make monthly donations to several charities," I said. "Including a downtown homeless shelter."

"Oh," Mac said. "That's nice."

"I prefer not to give money directly to panhandlers," I said.

He gave me a sort of puzzled frown. "Okay," he said.

"I think it's more helpful to go through the established support structures," I said. "There's more hope for real, long-term improvement in the person's life that way."

He looked at me. "Are you telling me I shouldn't have given that guy five bucks?"

I thought about that for a moment. "No," I admitted. "I think I'm trying to present my excuses for why I didn't." Frankly, I'd barely even registered the man's existence as we walked by.

Mac shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Your way's probably smarter. But, I've _been_ homeless, so..." he trailed off.

"Shit," I said. "I hadn't thought about that."

"Yeah, well," he said. "It was a long time ago. I've also been fabulously rich and powerful, so I guess it averages out."

"Do you miss that?" I asked—although as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. He'd been in a _Triad gang_.

But he just said, "Sure," like it was a casual thing. "Who doesn't love luxury? A private box at the racetrack, all-night yacht parties, vacations on private white sand beaches, my own personal tailor—I mean, who'd even _bother_ being a criminal if it didn't promise a great payoff?"

Listening to him list off the trappings of wealth that he'd previously enjoyed, I comprehended for the first time that he and Li Ann had been adopted straight into the heart of a highly _successful_ criminal empire. I thought back again, with a bit of ironic amusement, to when I'd first met them. I'd been a bit self-conscious about the gap between my economic status and theirs, and I'd gone to some lengths to avoid intimidating them. Now I could see that _that_ effort had been quite unnecessary.

"How long has it been since you got out?" I asked.

He thought for a moment. "It was summer, so ... wow. Two and a half years. It seems like yesterday."

"And then you spent some time in prison, and ended up in the Agency?" I said, trying to piece together the whole timeline.

"Yeah," he said. "I was recruited in November 1997, so ... hey, I've survived for more than a year! Nice. Take _that_ , Dobrinsky."

I was about to ask what Dobrinsky had to do with anything, when Mac suddenly looked across the street, said "Hold on—" and darted away into traffic.

I stayed rooted on the sidewalk in momentary shock. Mac was dodging four lanes of traffic, prompting honks and screeching tires. "Mac!" I called out. "What are you _doing_?"

I thought of a straight couple that my wife and I had been friends with in days gone by, who had kept their overactive toddler on a leash for his own safety.

Fleetingly, I wished I had a leash for Mac.

(I knew where to get one, too—the same place where I'd bought him the leather pants for our tango number.)

He made it to the other side safely, but my relief was short-lived; I saw what he'd been running towards.

There was a knot of angry young men in front of a tattoo parlour on the other side of the street. Some kind of dispute was definitely in progress; I couldn't make out any details over the noise of the traffic, but several of them were shouting and gesticulating. And—shit. A couple of them had knives in their hands.

I pulled out my phone and dialed 911.

On the other side of the street, Mac had reached the group. What was he up to?

"911, what's your emergency?" said the operator.

I described the situation, and gave the address of the tattoo parlour.

Meanwhile, Mac had got himself between the two guys with knives. Wonderful.

I watched with uselessly-spiking adrenaline, from my safe place on the other side of the street, as one of the two armed individuals tried taking a stab _around_ Mac, towards the other knife-wielder. Then my view was cut off by the passing of a streetcar. When it moved out of the way, Mac was engaged in a confusing five-way fight, and I couldn't quite track where the knives were.

Then two police cars came screaming down the block and stopped in front of the group. Most of the young men scattered, but Mac had just pinned one of them against the plate glass window of the tattoo parlour.

Four police officers emerged from the squad cars, guns drawn, and then Mac and the one remaining young hoodlum were pressing their hands high against the plate glass and getting patted down. Which didn't concern me _too much_ , until I saw the officer pull up Mac's left pant leg, and remove a gun from a holster at his ankle.

Okay, this definitely qualified as Mac getting in trouble that I couldn't handle.

Feeling a bit frantic, I called Dobrinsky.

"Hello," he said. "Dobrinsky here."

"It's Benjamin Goldman," I said. "Ah, listen, I was told that I could call you if I needed help—"

"Shee-it," he said, in a sort of lazy drawl. "What's he done?"

"Well, we were walking downtown and he decided to stop a knife fight," I said quickly. "And now he seems to be under arrest. Possibly for illegal possession of a concealed firearm."

"I could send somebody for him in the morning," Dobrinsky offered. "Want the rest of the night off?"

"What?" I said. Across the street, Mac seemed to be trying to argue with the police. I winced. "No! I mean—is there anything you can do now? I don't think Vic will be very happy with me if Mac ends up spending the night in jail."

"True," Dobrinsky said. "Mansfield has gone pretty sweet on that Ramsey kid. I don't know what he sees in him." He sighed. "I'll make a call."

I flipped my phone closed and continued anxiously watching the scene across the street. I considered crossing over and trying to talk to the cops on Mac's behalf, but I couldn't think of anything that I could reasonably accomplish. If it weren't for the gun, I might've been able to offer up my account of how Mac had only been intervening to try to stop the fight.

Why the hell had he been carrying a _gun_?

Mac's hands were being cuffed now. And—what the hell? One of the police was pushing Mac against the window, and another one had her night-stick out and was pressing it against Mac's throat, pinning his head back. Both cops seemed to be shouting at him.

Oy gevalt, I really had to do something now.

There was a break in the traffic—red lights at both ends of the block. I trotted across the street.

The stray hoodlum was sitting in the back of one of the squad cars, looking glum. He gave me a curious glance as I passed.

Then one of the officers saw me. "Stay back," he said, raising a hand. "We have an incident in progress."

"Ah, hi, yes. I'm an attorney," I said—which wasn't especially relevant unless the officer was thinking about getting a divorce, but I figured it might help me capture his attention. "This young man—" I pointed at Mac— "was with me, when he intervened to try to prevent an altercation that was already in progress. I'm sure that he'll be happy to _come along quietly_ —" sending the emphasis in Mac's direction "—and answer all your questions at the station. I would also be happy to come along and make a statement as to everything that I saw," and I stared right at the cop who was choking Mac as I said that. She scowled, but I could see that she released some of the pressure on the night stick; Mac coughed, and let out a moan.

Then the fourth cop, who'd been inside the squad car with the other arrestee, stepped back out onto the sidewalk. He was tall and fit-looking, with a blond buzz cut. "We just got a call from on high," he said with a grimace. He nodded towards Mac. "We have to let this one go."

" _What_?" said the cop with the night stick.

"He's one of _them_ ," said the tall blond one.

The other cop lowered her night stick and stepped away from Mac, with a look of disgust. "Oh, you're _kidding_ me."

Mac raised his cuffed hands to rub at his neck—and grinned. "I _told_ you. We're on the _same side_." His voice was a bit hoarse.

The burly, south-Asian cop who'd been holding Mac against the window also stepped back, and spit on the sidewalk.

"Cuffs?" Mac said, holding his hands out.

The blond one fished out a key, and released Mac's hands.

"Gun?" Mac added, looking mischievously delighted.

The female cop handed it to him, still in the zip-locked evidence bag.

Well, that got rid of any lingering doubts I might have had about the power—or existence—of Mac's shadowy government agency.

Mac de-bagged the gun, re-holstered it, and tucked the empty plastic bag in his coat pocket. "So I guess we're done here. Good night, officers. And a lovely evening to you all!"

* * *

The coffee shop we'd been aiming for was only a block and a half away. When we got there, I ordered a decaff latte (wishing very much that I could get something stronger), and Mac ordered a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, and a cup of ice.

We claimed a table for two, and he sprawled in the chair facing the door. He immediately transferred the ice from the cup to the scavenged evidence bag, and pressed it against the marks on his neck.

I rubbed my temples. I hardly knew where to start. "Mac," I whispered, "why do you have a _gun_?"

"In case somebody starts shooting at me," he said, like it was trivially obvious.

"Does Vic know you have it with you?"

"Yeah," he said. "Don't worry. We talked about it. I would never shoot myself. And it's not safe to walk around the Agency unarmed."

Okay. This was a secret agent thing. I had to let it go.

Mac set the bag of ice on the table and unzipped his coat, and then picked up the ice again and tucked it under the coat on his left side.

I raised an eyebrow. "Did the broken rib get hurt again?"

He shrugged—then winced, and shrugged again with only his right shoulder. "A little."

Oy vey, I was going to get _fired_ from Mac-sitting duty at this rate. "What the hell did you go running across the road like that for? And jumping into the middle of a _knife fight_?"

"It looked like somebody was going to get hurt," he said.

I gave him a long, thoughtful look. He put the bag of ice on the table again, took a sip of hot chocolate, and then pressed the ice against his neck. I noticed that he was doing everything with his right hand, leaving his left arm tucked loosely against his body.

He was brave, that was for sure. And reckless, which was the flip side.

"We could have just called the police," I pointed out.

Mac snorted. "Those clowns? I had everything under control until they showed up."

"Hm," I said, a bit doubtfully. But then I added, "I really don't like the way they treated you. I think you should file a complaint." The marks on his neck from the nightstick were deep red, and his voice was quite noticeably hoarse. And I'd seen the whole thing—it was possible that he'd _said_ some things that had annoyed them, but he hadn't been physically resisting arrest.

But Mac was shaking his head. "Secret agent," he reminded me, his voice creaking. "Double-edged sword. I can't really get arrested—but I don't exactly have civil rights, either. I told you before. I don't exist."

I shook my head, in dismay rather than negation. _Too dangerous to address,_ I classified it. That particular mental file-folder was getting pretty stuffed. "Should I be taking you to the ER?" I asked instead. "You're okay getting _physical_ care there, right?" He'd been patched up at the hospital after getting shot at the Two-Ring Circus, after all.

"Yeah," Mac said, "but no. I don't need to go. I'd be triaged to the end of the line and we'd be there all night. I'll see the doctor at the Agency tomorrow morning." He switched the ice back to his ribs. "Hey, my throat's kind of sore. How 'bout you talk for a while? Tell me about when you came out. How you started doing drag. Did Ebony get you into it?"

"Oh, my, no," I said with a little smile, "I got _her_ into it."

So then, with occasional encouraging questions from Mac, I talked for a good hour. I told him how I'd met David through the University of Toronto's LGBT student association's professional mentoring initiative. He'd already been in the process of overcoming all the obstacles life had thrown at him—a gay black man and the first person in his family to go to university, he was in his second year of law school when I met him. I was thrilled to help him get a position articling at the firm I worked for (I wasn't a partner yet, but I was well on my way). Along the way, he started performing, and created Ebony Stalking. The next thing I knew he was running the monthly events, and plunging himself into gay rights activism.

"And did you ever sleep with him?" Mac asked, at one point.

I shook my head. "Never. He's my best friend; I can't even imagine thinking of him that way. Of course, when we first met there was far too much of a power differential; it would have been inappropriate. And now—well. That's not what we are."

"So who _are_ you sleeping with?" Mac asked—with an innocent expression.

I rolled my eyes. "Nobody, sadly. And you know that."

"Just checking," Mac said. "It's been a few weeks. So ... why not?"

"Oof," I muttered. "Don't pull your punches, or anything."

"I'm serious." He did his three-way switch again—putting the ice down, taking a sip of hot chocolate, and moving the ice to the other injured area. He was on his second hot chocolate and his third ice pack. I'd obtained the refills for him so that he wouldn't have to move, although he'd said he didn't need me to. I was suspicious that he was in more pain than he was letting on—he kept saying he was all right, but he was moving very gingerly—and I hoped that Vic would call soon. "You're hot, rich, and a great dancer," he added. "I bet guys are beating down your door."

"Mmm," I murmured skeptically. "I'm an aging queen, Mac. Nobody's interested in me."

"I would've slept with you," he said earnestly. "When we first met. If Li Ann hadn't told me I couldn't."

I allowed myself a snort of laughter, and let myself bask in the glow of the compliment for half a second or so. "But you were new to the scene," I pointed out. "And by the way, I _wouldn't_ have slept with you—as I said at the time, you're much too young for me."

"So find somebody your own age," he said. "Come on, Ben. You're not the only single forty-something gay man in Toronto."

I took a sip of my latte—I was still on my first, and it was quite cold by now. "Hm," I demurred. "Honestly—I think it may be too late for all that. I'm set in my ways, and it's hard to imagine starting fresh with somebody new. Besides, my last relationship ended badly." My first and only long-term relationship with a man had lasted for three years, and ended four years ago. God, had it been that long already?

"Bullshit," Mac said, looking at me intensely.

I blinked. "Pardon?"

"That's bullshit," he said, raising his voice even though it sounded painful. "You're lonely. Why are you making excuses? Just get out there and _try_."

He was right. Why _was_ I making excuses? But I shook my head. "It's not that easy. There really _aren't_ that many single forty-something gay men in Toronto, Mac, and we all already know each other."

"Well..." he raised an eyebrow at me, "do you _like_ any of them?" And then he must have read something in my face, because he broke into a grin. "You _do_!"

"Stop it," I muttered, sipping my cold latte. "I couldn't ask him out."

"Who?" Mac asked. "And why not?"

"He's grieving," I said, answering only the second question. "His partner died three years ago. They'd been together for more than a decade."

"Okay," Mac said, "that's sad, but _three years_? He's ready to move on. Hell, I'd barely been dead for _one_ year when Li Ann got together with Vic."

I stared at him, trying to parse that. "Mac? You're not dead."

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Sure. But she thought I was, at the time."

" _Really_ thought you were dead?" I couldn't help asking. "Or just didn't know where you were?"

"Really," he nodded. "When we were escaping the Tangs, she saw the factory blow up with me inside, and then the police told her I was dead."

"Oh, okay." I wasn't even terribly shocked. I must be getting used to their crazy stories. "But ... let me see if I've got this straight. You and Li Ann were lovers in Hong Kong." And Mac and Michael, but I certainly wasn't going to bring that up. "And then she got recruited by the Agency and she thought you were dead, so she got together with Vic. And then you reappeared, and you and Li Ann got back together ... _and_ you and Vic got together?"

"Hm, more or less," Mac said. "But there were some long gaps in there. And Li Ann broke up with Vic. They're not dating. Sometimes they both sleep with me, but I have to be in the middle." He grinned. "I like being in the middle."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "That, I can believe."

"And there's no sex when Li Ann's around," Mac added.

"Right," I said. "You mentioned."

He coughed, winced, and shifted the ice back to his throat. "So?" he said, in a bit of a croak. "Will you ask him out?"

"Him who?" I asked, momentarily lost.

"Him the guy who's been alone for three years, that you want to kiss," Mac said.

I blinked. "Oh." Then I shook my head and stared down at the dregs of my latte. "Probably better not to. It's complicated."

"Complicated how?" Mac asked. He was always pushing me one way or another, wasn't he?

I was reluctant to give voice to it. But then—he'd used me enough times as _his_ sounding board for things he probably shouldn't be saying. "His partner died of AIDS-related complications," I said. "And he is also HIV-positive."

He looked at me. "And you aren't?"

"Right."

He cocked his head a little to the side. "Are you scared?"

He didn't say it like a challenge. He asked it in a tone of honest curiosity.

I looked at Mac—this 26-year-old secret agent who had, an hour ago, run into the middle of a knife fight just to stop a bunch of dumb young men he didn't know from hurting themselves. "Yes," I admitted, and felt ashamed.

"Of getting sick?"

"Yes." I took a breath. "And no. And yes. I know that there are ways to be very safe. There are couples who have been managing it for years, even a decade—one partner positive and the other negative. There's no reason we couldn't—well. It does scare me, but maybe not too much to handle. But also, I'm scared of _him_ getting sick. If ... if I fall in love with him, and then he gets sick, it will hurt." Fuck, said out loud that made me sound like such a coward. I was appalled with myself.

Mac just looked at me. "Well, his life expectancy's gotta be longer than mine," he said. "I think you should go for it."

I frowned, caught by what he'd said about his own life expectancy. "Sorry—Mac, are _you_ sick?"

"What?" he said. "Oh. Nope. Healthy as a slightly beat-up horse, here." He grinned, but it didn't reach his eyes. "It's the _lifestyle_ that's gonna get me. Statistically speaking, my life expectancy at this point has gotta be negative. I can't even count how many times I should've died by now. Ben, I've seen the inside of my own fucking coffin. That was a trip. Not metaphorically—I mean, I got kidnapped and locked in a coffin to get shipped off to Hong Kong for execution."

"Oy gevalt," I murmured. "How did you get out of that one?"

He coughed—his voice had been getting hoarser as the night wore on. "Vic and Li Ann saved me. Like always. But how long until one day they can't? Or maybe one of them will bite it first. That would suck. They could both drown tonight breaking into that fucking submarine. That's why I had to be with you, by the way. Because Vic knows I get scared when the two of them have to work without me, and I might fuck myself up. And if they did both die, I would _definitely_ kill myself. There is no fucking way I could survive that." He shuddered. "But—sorry. I was trying to explain why you should ask the guy out. Losing Vic and Li Ann would kill me, but I would never have made it _this_ far without them, so ... love wins! Take the risk." He put the ice bag down and gulped his hot chocolate like it was a tumbler of whisky.

* * *

Vic called not long afterwards to find out where we were. Mac relaxed when he heard that Vic and Li Ann had finished their mission safely. While we waited for Vic, we went back to talking about the ballet.

I was distracted, though. Mac had given me a lot to think about. Love, and mortality and death. Taking chances.

His assessment of his own survival chances had been disturbingly bleak, and I really hadn't liked the flat, offhand way he'd promised to kill himself if Li Ann and Vic predeceased him. I wished I could leap in with assurances that everything would probably turn out fine, but actually from what I knew of their lives up to this point, it probably _wouldn't_. And who was I to try to tell Mac that he must have some reserve of inner strength that would let him survive the hypothetical deaths of his partners—if I was too afraid to even ask an old friend out to dinner?

* * *

When Vic finally came through the door of the coffee shop, he caught Mac's eye and they both did that thing where their smiles turned into pure sunshine.

God, that was what love looked like.

And then Vic caught sight of the marks on Mac's neck, obviously. His face went cloudy-day, and he rushed over to our table. "Mac, what _happened_?" he said, brushing a fingertip across the marks. "You were at the _ballet_."

"He stopped a knife fight on the way to the coffee shop," I said. "Sorry," I added, as though I'd had any ability to stop what had happened.

"It was more of a knife _argument_ ," Mac said, to Vic's appalled look. "Nobody got stabbed. And I was handling it fine until the cops showed up. _They're_ the ones who decided to choke me."

"Didn't you give them the code phrase?" he said.

Mac grimaced. "I can never remember the code phrase. They change it too often." He moved the ice pack up from his ribs to his neck.

"Did you get their badge numbers?" Vic asked, looking grim. So maybe Vic thought Mac still had some civil rights.

But Mac shook his head. "Don't go all wrathful-avenger on them. I pissed them off. You know how I am with cops." His voice, which had been a gravelly croak, nearly gave out on the last word. He coughed—and then gritted his teeth, and moved the ice pack back to his ribs.

"Oh Jesus, you re-fractured the rib, didn't you," Vic murmured, looking worried. And then he blinked. "If you didn't remember the code phrase, why did the cops let you go?"

"I called Dobrinsky," I said.

Vic shot me a grateful look. "Good thinking."

Then he turned his attention to helping Mac get out of the wrought-iron chair. When he tried to grasp Mac's left wrist, Mac hissed sharply, and shook his head.

Vic turned to me. "Can you help?" he asked. "If you lift under his right shoulder..."

We coordinated efforts, and got Mac on his feet. He looked pale and a little sweaty, but he grinned at me. "Thanks for the company," he whispered hoarsely. "Think about what I said, okay?"

"I certainly will," I promised.


	6. Chapter 6

I was surprised to get a call from Li Ann the very next day. "Hi," she said. "The Director's booked us a chalet in Horseshoe Valley for the weekend. We're going to try some cross-country skiing. The chalet has three bedrooms, and we only need two, so we were wondering if you'd like to come along."

"'We' in this case being you, Mac and Vic?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "And, ah, full disclosure—historically speaking, there's about a one in five chance that this is secretly a mission that the Director doesn't want to tell us about ahead of time. But I did _ask_ her if it would be okay if we brought you along, and she said yes. So it's _probably_ safe."

"So, this would be a chance to spend time with all of you?" I asked. "And do some skiing? And I _probably_ won't end up in the middle of a gunfight or chasing spider goats up and down the slopes? Hm." I thought about my current weekend plans—which were non-existent. I didn't even intend to go to the Rainbow Room, because I hadn't yet decided if I was brave enough to take Mac's challenge and share my feelings with ... well. With Casey. "I'm in," I said.

* * *

The agents were heading to the chalet that evening, but I decided I'd rather do the drive in daylight, so I joined them Saturday morning. I left early to get ahead of the traffic, and arrived at the chalet at eight-thirty in the morning.

The chalet was a lovely, two-storey faux-rustic gingerbread house with lots of exposed pine beams. Vic opened the door promptly to my knock, and ushered me in with a welcoming smile. "Make yourself comfortable," he said. "I'm just making breakfast. If you want to put your things away, your bedroom is the third door upstairs."

I looked around from my position in the entryway as I took off my coat. The downstairs was open-concept, with the kitchen and living area separated only by a chest-high counter. Vic had already headed to the stove to stir the contents of a frying pan. A wooden staircase on my left led up to the second storey. There was a wood stove at the far end of the room; the warmth and the faint crackling let me know that there was a fire currently going. I breathed in the wood-smoke smell appreciatively.

In the living area, couple of comfortable-looking couches and an armchair were grouped around a low glass coffee table, and the whole set rested on a thick-piled burgundy-patterned rug. Mac and Li Ann were curled up at opposite ends of one of the couches, facing each other, their legs tucked under a shared blanket. I left my overnight bag at the bottom of the staircase for the moment and went over to say hello to them.

"Hi," Li Ann said. "I'm so glad you could make it! Did you have a good drive?"

"There was a bit of traffic getting out of the city, but it was smooth sailing after that," I said.

Mac didn't say anything, although he gave me a bit of a quirked smile of greeting. His left arm was tucked in a sling. He was wearing a beige cable-knit turtleneck sweater. It looked warm and comfortable; it also hid his neck.

"Mac can't talk," Li Ann said. "Until at least next Tuesday. Doctor's orders."

Mac frowned, and picked up a coil-bound notebook that had been tucked next to his body. He balanced it on his knee, and then flipped one-handed back through several already-written pages. Finally, scowling, he held up a page that said 'Dobrinsky'. 

Li Ann rolled her eyes. "Mac thinks that Dobrinsky bribed the doctor to forbid him from talking. But what the doctor told _Vic_ was that Mac could permanently damage his voice box if he strains it while he's healing."

"I see," I said. "That's rough." Mac was an exceptionally chatty person; I could imagine that this situation would be particularly hard for him.

Mac nodded glumly.

"The eggs are ready," Vic called from the kitchen. "Mac, stay put, I'll bring yours to you. Ben, do you want any?"

"Oh, no thanks," I said. "I ate before I left."

Li Ann got up and went to help herself, while Vic brought a bowl over to the couch for Mac. "I made them extra soft," he said, handing Mac the bowl. "See if you can handle them. If not, there's always the protein shakes."

Mac balanced the bowl on his lap and took a small spoonful. I saw that he winced as he swallowed, and Vic looked worried—but Mac gave a thumbs-up and continued to eat.

"So the injury turned out to be fairly severe, then," I observed, resisting the urge to apologize again. I really couldn't have done anything to prevent Mac from getting hurt—he'd moved too quickly, and made his own choices.

"Yeah," Vic confirmed—although, at the same time, Mac put down his spoon so that he could wiggle his hand in a so-so gesture. Vic rolled his eyes at that, and sat on the couch close to Mac. "His throat should heal up in a couple of weeks; it's just bruised. The rib's more serious—the fracture got aggravated. He's worse off now than when he first broke it. He's back on the codeine, and the healing's set back by at least three weeks."

I perched on the edge of the armchair. "And the arm?" I asked, eyeing the sling.

"Oh, his arm's fine," Vic said. "It just hurts him too much to move it, because of the rib."

"So..." I said, "I gather that Mac won't be skiing this weekend."

Mac's lips twitched. He gave a rueful head-shake.

"Definitely not," Vic said. "We can go out in pairs, so there's always someone to stay here with Mac. Don't worry," he added, "we won't ask you to stay with him on your own. You can spend the weekend skiing."

So it seemed that I was indeed fired from Mac-sitting duty. That wasn't surprising, perhaps, considering my 1-for-3 track record of managing to keep him safe on the occasions I'd been asked to look after him.

* * *

After breakfast, Vic and I went out cross-country skiing.

He needed to rent equipment; I had my own, which had been gathering dust in my closet since the divorce. I was far from an expert skier, but Cathy and I used to go out a few times each winter.

The paths were well-marked, and wide enough that we could companionably ski two abreast. We set an unambitious pace; like me, Vic apparently hadn't skied in over a decade.

We chatted as we made our way along, keeping the topics neutral at first—the condition of the trail (a little icy, but acceptable), the weather (overcast with a chance of flurries, but no wind, which was perfect for skiing), the landscape (lovely in a bleak winter way, and a nice change from the concrete jungle we lived in). We agreed that the Toronto Maple Leafs were having a great season.

"Oh hey," Vic said, upon hearing that I followed the Leafs (if only fairly idly), "then you'll back me up if I want to put on the game tonight?"

"Back you up?" I repeated.

"Mac and Li Ann don't care about hockey," Vic said. "Last Saturday they ganged up on me and we ended up watching a movie instead."

I was intrigued by this insight into their three-way dynamic. "Does that sort of thing happen a lot?" I asked.

" _Yes_ ," he said, sounding aggrieved. But then he immediately qualified it: "I shouldn't complain. They just have a lot in common. I used to feel threatened by that—back when Mac and I were fighting over Li Ann, especially. But now I understand that they've been through hell together, and for me to be jealous of that would be ... gross."

"I have trouble picturing you and Mac fighting over Li Ann," I confessed. "First of all, because you and Mac seem so attached to each other. And secondly, because I can't imagine her putting up with that."

"Oh, she didn't," Vic assured me quickly, with a bemused wince. "She broke up with me and told us she didn't want to be with either one of us."

"But she and Mac _are_ together now?" I still didn't feel like I really grasped the tangled history of the relationships between the three agents.

"That's recent," Vic said. "Just since Michael tried to kill them, right before Christmas."

"And you and Mac got together in mid-January," I recalled—as per the stories Mac had told me during our dance rehearsals, which had apparently been largely true despite the fact that they'd come from Mac-the-underemployed-security-guard rather than Mac-the-secret-agent. "I'd be curious to hear your version of that story, if you'd feel up for it. Did your attraction to Mac really take you completely by surprise?"

Vic let out a sharp " _Hah_ ," halfway between an exhalation and a laugh. We were going up a slight incline, so we were both breathing hard anyway. "Did it ever," he added. "It pretty much hit me like a ton of bricks."

"You'd already known him for, what, a year?" I said. Mac had mentioned that he'd started at the Agency a little over a year ago. "And you'd never been attracted to him, or any other man?"

"Right," he said.

"So ... what changed?"

He was silent for a few strides, looking thoughtful. Then he said, "I found out he was bi."

"And that was it? Just like that, you fell for him?"

"I know this maybe makes me sound kind of dumb," Vic said, "but I really hadn't suspected. I mean, sure, I saw him flirting with men all the time—but he flirted with _everybody_ , I thought that was just his personality. My whole life, I'd never known a single person who was gay or bi."

I seriously doubted the strict truth of that statement, but of course what he really meant was that he'd never known anyone who was _out_ to him. I held my tongue.

"So the whole idea ... it wasn't quite _real_ to me, you know?" he went on. "I mean, it was something guys joked about. Kind of a boogeyman thing—no offence."

He'd been a cop, I recalled. I could imagine the nature of the 'jokes'. But again, I just let him keep talking. He sounded like he was working some of this out for himself just now, in the telling of it.

"When I found out Mac was bi, I kind of freaked out," Vic confessed then, looking a bit pained. "I yelled at him. I think I would have _hit_ him, if Li Ann hadn't been there to stop me—and that would have been bad, Jesus, he had a concussion already. Not my proudest moment."

I could picture it, unfortunately. "The concussion—" I observed, "this would have been shortly after the incident with Michael, then?"

"The day after he nearly killed us all, yeah," Vic nodded. "And what I _actually_ found out was that Mac had been fucking Michael. I didn't realize until much later what that had been like, the fucked-up power dynamics and the abuse. So I reacted to the sleeping-with-the-enemy thing, I guess. But also— _agh_." He shook his head, and glided down a short hill before picking up the thread again. "Mac always got under my skin. From the first time we met. I told myself that I hated him. But we worked together _so well_. Like, we were just automatically in sync from day one, even though we were fighting over Li Ann, even though we're completely the opposite of each other in every way. When we're in a fight together, I don't even have to _glance_ at him to know which way to move. I can _feel_ him, like he's an extra part of me."

I took a second to parse that, slightly confused, and then I realized that 'fighting together' in this case must refer to Vic and Mac in alliance, engaged in combat with some other opponents.

So ... fighting for their lives, then. Well, that would certainly bring an intensity to the relationship.

"So you had strong feelings for Mac," I interpreted. "But they weren't necessarily _positive_. Or sexual?"

He grinned, wryly. "Well, I did start to like him. It snuck up on me. I wasn't ready to _admit_ it, though. Then Michael happened, and the soy mill. Ah, did Mac or Li Ann tell you about that?"

"I can't recall anything about a soy mill specifically," I said.

"The explosion," Vic clarified.

"Oh," I recalled. "Mac said that you and Li Ann rescued him before a building exploded. The same night that Li Ann killed Michael." I could say these things calmly only because they still didn't seem quite real to me—especially now, as Vic and I were gliding through the peaceful snowy wilderness.

"Yeah," Vic said, "okay. Well, we'd been at the soy mill dealing with another issue—a rogue assassin. Michael was with us; he was supposedly on our side. Things were pretty much wrapped up, and we were leaving the mill, and Mac and Michael were behind us—and then they weren't. God, as soon as we noticed, I _knew_ Michael had done something to him. The Director warned me that there might be a bomb, so I hauled ass. Mac was unconscious when I found him—Michael had brought a light fixture down on his head. He came around, though, when I got to him, and then _he_ warned me about the bomb. He told me to run."

"You sound ... _angry_ about that," I observed.

"If I'd left him there, he would have died," Vic said. "So, yeah, it makes me angry. But also—okay, we _risk_ our lives to save each other all the time. We couldn't work as a team if we didn't do that. But that night in the soy mill, he wasn't risking his life, he was _giving_ it. He couldn't get out of there on his own. Trying to get me to leave—he was ready to sacrifice himself to save me. So. That made me see him differently."

This was heavy stuff. "You fell in love with him, then?" I asked.

"It made me start paying _attention_ to him," he said. "I'd always kind of written him off as shallow and self-centred. But how can you keep thinking that about a guy who was literally willing to _die_ to save your life? My whole understanding of him sort of flipped overnight. And I started to realize that I really did like him—he was funny, and sweet, and fundamentally _kind_ in a way that I hadn't been ready to see before."

"That explains liking him as a friend," I observed. "Maybe even loving him. But it doesn't quite explain how the sex came into it."

"Oh, God, I started getting hard-ons for him as soon as I found out he had a crush on _me_ ," Vic said. "Is that weird?"

"Not really," I said. "Being the object of someone's attentions can be very sexy. The only thing that's surprising is that you'd never had that kind of reaction to a man before. You must have at least realized that you had the _potential_...?"

"Well, I'd never known about any man being attracted to _me_ before," he said. And then he looked thoughtful. "Actually, you know, that might be the key to the whole thing. I've never really been wired for unrequited crushes. But when a woman comes on to _me_ —yeah. Especially if she's in some kind of trouble at the time."

He sounded a bit rueful when he said that last bit, and I supposed he was thinking of some specific incidents. "So there's a bit of a saviour complex at play?" I inferred.

"The Director calls it my 'wounded bird syndrome'," he said, _very_ ruefully.

Oh, my. I used my poles to help me up a short rise, and considered whether to bring up the obvious. "Ah," I said, "interesting that you should say that..."

"Yeah," he winced. "I know. Mac."

Okay, at least I hadn't had to be the one to say it.

"Would I have fallen for him if he hadn't been in the middle of _drowning_ at the same time I started really noticing him?" Vic asked—a question for himself, obviously. "I'd like to say yes. But there's no way to know, is there?"

"Well, ultimately it's not so important what brought you together," I pointed out, philosophically. "What's important is what _keeps_ you together."

"True," he said with an air of relief, as though I'd said something wise.

I decided not to point out that I'd never really had a successful relationship myself—or that I made my living facilitating divorces.

"How's he doing?" I asked instead. "I have to imagine that the throat injury is very frustrating."

"The whole thing is very frustrating," Vic agreed. "He does _not_ like being sidelined. But yeah, not being able to _talk_ is a new low. Jesus, if he could somehow stay _out_ of trouble for a couple of weeks!"

"Is that usually difficult for him?" I asked.

"God, yes," Vic said. "If there's trouble to get into, Mac will find it."

I thought about bringing up my leash idea, but I wasn't sure if Vic would appreciate the joke. "I guess I saw that for myself on Thursday," I mentioned. "When he suddenly decided to jump into a knife fight on the way to the coffee shop." 

"Okay, to be fair," Vic said, "if Li Ann or I had been there, we would've done the same thing. We just wouldn't have provoked the cops into beating us up afterwards."

My turn to wince. "Vic, that's not fair to Mac. Whatever it was he said to the police, it couldn't have justified what they did to him."

He looked at me sideways. "You really don't know Mac very well, do you?"

"I don't think it's appropriate to joke about this," I said evenly. "What I saw that night was clear police brutality, and I'm fairly upset that there's not going to be any accountability for it."

"Mm, don't assume that the police officers won't face consequences," Vic said thoughtfully. "The Director wasn't happy about adding another three weeks minimum to the time for Mac to make it back on the active list."

And just like that, we were back in frightening-extralegal-powers territory. Exactly what kind of 'consequences' were on the table, here?

I decided not to ask questions that I didn't want to know the answers to.

* * *

When Vic and I got back to the chalet, pink-cheeked and sweaty, Li Ann was on the couch with Mac again. "Hi!" she said. "Did you have fun?"

Mac just gave a little wave.

"Yeah, it was nice," Vic said. "The surface was a bit icy, but it's starting to snow now, so it'll probably be nice and fluffy this afternoon—if you don't mind snow in your face. Have you ordered lunch?"

"No," Li Ann said, "we figured we'd wait for you. The menu's over on the kitchen counter. We already circled what we want."

"The Director told us we could get whatever we want from room service," Vic said to me. "Just no booze."

"Okay," I said. I wondered if that was a departmental-budget restriction, or just a precaution around Mac. Oh well, either way—a glass of wine with dinner would have been nice, but I could live without it.

I made my selection and then left Vic to handle the ordering. I joined Li Ann and Mac, settling myself in the armchair.

Li Ann was reading aloud to Mac, from a Chinese book. I had no idea what the subject was, of course, so I just listened to the sound of it for a little while, watching the two of them.

They were snuggled close together. Mac's legs were stretched out on a footstool now, and Li Ann was tucked against his right side with her own legs curled under her. They were both wearing thick sweaters, loose-fitting pants, and woolly socks. The whole scene was very cozy and intimate.

"What are you reading?" I asked eventually, when she paused.

"It's a book of poems," she said. "It's called, hm. In English it would be _Three Hundred Tang Poems_."

"Tang—as in your former gang?" I asked, a little perplexed.

She shook her head, and Mac smirked a little. "No, that's just a coincidence," Li Ann said. "It's an era of Chinese history."

"So you have an interest in poetry?" I asked.

"Well, it's a very famous collection," she said. "We studied it when we were kids. Everyone does. I had a copy that I picked up in Vancouver when I first came to Canada, when I was feeling homesick. I thought it might make nice vacation reading."

"Oh, I didn't realize that you'd spent time in Vancouver," I said.

She nodded. "I was there for over a year, actually."

"I've only visited there a couple of times," I mentioned. "It's quite lovely. Did you have a chance to visit Stanley Park? See the redwoods?"

She nodded, smiling. "That's where Vic and I got engaged. I mean, that didn't work out in the end. But it was a nice day."

Mac picked up the pen that was lying balanced on the notebook on his lap. He removed the cap with his teeth, and then wrote on a page that already had some Chinese characters on it: _Also where she tricked me and Vic into holding hands for the first time._

Li Ann laughed when she saw what he'd written. "Ha! True. It was immediately clear to me that you were perfect for each other."

 _Took Vic long enough to figure it out,_ he wrote underneath, making a face.

Vic arrived and read over Mac's shoulder. "Hm. Well, maybe I would've come around sooner if you'd _told_ me that you liked me, instead of constantly antagonizing me." He looked at me, and smirked. "Thanks for the talk this morning, by the way. It really helped me understand some things."

Mac was writing again. _Wanted your attention._ He held it up to Vic and made a puppy-dog sad face.

Vic laughed affectionately. "I know. Well, now you've got it." Leaning over the back of the couch, he gave Mac a kiss on the cheek. Mac turned his head to receive another one on the lips.

I left them being cute together, and went upstairs to change into fresh clothes. The doorbell rang just as I was heading back down.

"Food's here," Li Ann called.

"I'll set the table," Vic said.

Li Ann was carrying the bags of food to the table and Vic was fetching dishes from the kitchen. I noticed that Mac had been left alone on the couch, and was struggling to stand up unaided.

"Ah, would you like a hand?" I asked, drawing near as Mac gritted his teeth and sank back into his starting position, nostrils flaring with obvious pain.

Vic gave a sharp look in Mac's direction. "Shit," he said. "Mac— _page five_."

Mac sat still for a moment longer, taking shallow, panting breaths, then rolled his eyes and grabbed the notebook. He flipped it back to the beginning, and then leafed through to the fifth page. _I need help please,_ it said, in a loose cursive that was quite different from the spiky printing Mac had been producing in our recent conversation.

"That's not Mac's handwriting," I observed.

"I wrote it," Vic said. "He needed a nudge in the right direction."

Bemused, I offered Mac a hand up, which he accepted.

We settled down to lunch. Mac was having a lentil soup, while the rest of us had selected pasta dishes.

"I'd like to try skiing after lunch," Li Ann said. "Ben, would you be up for going out again?"

"I'm not sure," I said honestly. "After three hours out there this morning, I might just want to take it easy."

"Oh," Li Ann said, sounding disappointed.

"Were you hoping for company?" I asked. I didn't want to let her down—but I also wanted to be able to climb out of bed unaided tomorrow. Cross-country skiing involved a lot of muscles that I didn't use regularly, and I wasn't in my twenties anymore.

"I've never skied before," Li Ann said. "I was hoping you'd show me how to do it."

"Oh," I said. "Well, I suppose I could handle that."

* * *

I'd thought that going out with a complete novice would mean a slow, easy trip around one of the beginner trails.

I'd forgotten to take into account that Li Ann was astoundingly athletic, graceful, and twenty years my junior. For the first five minutes I was giving her instructions and she was struggling to keep her skis moving in the right direction; after that, she found her groove and I could barely keep up with her.

Finally I swallowed my pride and asked her to slow down, at least.

"Sorry," she said, looking sheepish. She immediately slowed her pace. "This is really fun! I finally see the point of _snow_. I wish Mac could try this. Maybe we can come here again next winter."

At first I didn't find anything remarkable about that comment—but then I recalled my conversation with Mac at the coffee shop on Thursday, when he'd expressed grim predictions about his own life expectancy and concerns about Li Ann's and Vic's. "So you're still planning to be alive next winter?" I asked, before I thought better of it.

"Yes," she said, looking at me in surprise.

"Your jobs seem very dangerous," I mentioned, feeling awkward for having brought it up. The snow was falling softly around us.

"True," she said. "But we're very good at them."

I left it at that. Far be it from me to insist that Wile E. Coyote should look down.

* * *

Li Ann and I chatted companionably as we skied along after that, sticking to lighter topics than her and her fellow agents' mortality. She asked me questions about the history of drag night at the Rainbow Room, which I was happy to expound upon. I also let her know that I unfortunately hadn't found an asexual folks' discussion or support group for her. She seemed unconcerned. "I'm comfortable with where I am now," she said.

"Which is ... where, exactly?" I asked. "I have to admit, I still don't feel like I entirely understand what's going on between you and Mac and Vic."

"Mac is there for me," she said, "as much as I need him to be. I feel very comfortable with him. I can relax and be myself around him—I feel more like myself when I'm around him than when I'm _alone_ , even, because he knows me so well. He _sees_ me, in a way that makes me feel ... real." She shrugged, shook her head, and dug her poles into the snow to ascend a short rise. "Does that make sense?"

"Sure," I said. "That sounds lovely." It made _me_ feel lonely, actually, but I didn't need to go into that.

"And I can be physically affectionate with him, without feeling any pressure to go farther than I want to. I know he _likes_ sex, but he has Vic for that."

"You and Vic seem very close as well," I mentioned. "And I understand that you used to be lovers. And Mac mentioned that sometimes the three of you even spend the night together, in one bed. So I'm not sure I understand why you say that you're with Mac, but not with Vic."

"Well, I don't kiss Vic," Li Ann said. "Um, I offered once. At Christmas dinner, when I was slightly tipsy. And he said no. What I have with Mac wouldn't work with Vic. It's sort of hard to explain ... Vic and I are very close friends. But I think he's fundamentally monogamous."

"I'm not sure I even understand how the concept of monogamy applies, if you're not having sex," I confessed.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, gliding down a short hill with instinctively perfect form. "I think it's a state of mind," she said. "A way of being focused on just one person—or not."

"So Vic is monogamous," I said, "and Mac is not."

She snorted a laugh. "Definitely not. He wants _everybody_ to love him."

"And you?" I asked.

"Hm," she said. "I am right now. I'm only with Mac. But inherently ... no. I can imagine circumstances where I would want to be in a relationship with more than one person at the same time." She gave me a cautious, sideways glance. "Do you find that shocking?"

I let out a sharp, surprised laugh. "I find _many_ things about you shocking," I confessed. "But not that."

* * *

When we got back to the chalet, I was a bit surprised to see that Vic and Mac were gone. There was a note in Vic's handwriting saying that they'd gone for a walk and would be back by dinnertime.

"Any suggestions for how to pass the time while we wait for them?" I asked Li Ann.

"I'll make some tea," she offered. "Do you know how to play Go?"

"No," I admitted, "but I've heard of it. Would you be up for teaching me the basics?"

She smiled. "Sure. I'll clean off the coffee table."

"I can do that," I offered, since she'd said she'd make the tea.

She cast a doubtful glance over at the coffee table. "No, I'd better do it. I won't ask you to pick up used tissues."

It was true, the coffee table was in a bit of a state—besides about six empty mugs and two dirty bowls, there was a box of kleenex surrounded by crumpled tissues. "Mac's not getting sick again, is he?" I asked with a bit of concern. Considering the broken rib, that would be a miserable situation.

"No," she said, starting to collect the tissues. "These are mine. Some of the poems this morning made me a little sad."

The size of the tissue pile suggested a fairly extended session of crying, if that's what they were from. "Anything you want to talk about?" I asked, careful to keep my tone light, not pushing.

"No, it's all right," she said. "It's just—our father died, not long ago. Some of the poems made me think of him."

I remembered Mac locking himself in the bathroom stall at the museum last week, after seeing the Rembrandt painting. "Mac told me," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Did he tell you how he died?" she asked, a bit hesitantly.

"Yes." So at least this time I knew enough not to voice any stunningly-inappropriate platitudes.

She just nodded. "It still feels like an open wound," she said quietly. "But ... it helped to talk about it, this morning. To read some poems, and remember. I mean, Mac couldn't talk, but he wrote. And he suggested poems."

That was a very intimate moment for her to have shared with me. "It's been thirteen years since my father died," I offered, sharing my own vulnerability in return. "So—not an open wound. More like a long-faded scar. But I still miss him. And I have this lingering uneasiness ... I didn't come out before he died. So I'll never know if he would have accepted me for who I really was."

She gave me a sad smile. "I'll make that tea now," she said.

* * *

When Mac and Vic came back, Li Ann and I were sitting on the living room floor on opposite sides of the coffee table, just starting our second miniature game of Go. The rules turned out to be fascinatingly simple, but I could see that the strategy was deep and complex. Li Ann's stones were effortlessly surrounding mine at every turn and I had no idea how she was doing it.

Li Ann looked up. "Hi, guys! You were out for a long time."

"Mac was going kind of stir-crazy," Vic said. "I figured a slow walk would be okay. Hey, we saw some deer! And wild turkeys." He helped Mac out of his coat, and then brought a chair from the dining table over to the entryway. "Here," he said, "sit down and I'll get your boots off for you."

Mac was looking pretty haggard; I was honestly surprised that they'd gone for a long walk in the snow, considering how much trouble Mac seemed to be having just moving around the chalet. I wondered what 'stir crazy' might be code for, to have driven them outside.

We ordered supper—soup again for Mac, roast chicken for the rest of us. Mac slouched on the sofa while we waited for it to arrive, watching my game with Li Ann. He had his notebook on his lap, but he didn't do anything with it. Vic went into the kitchen to wash the dishes that had already accumulated.

"Would you like to play?" Li Ann asked Mac, when she'd finished crushing me again.

He shook his head.

"Li Ann," Vic called from the kitchen, "would you look at the last page in Mac's notebook and tell me what it says?"

Li Ann looked a bit confused. "What?"

"He wrote a whole page in Chinese this afternoon," Vic said. He sounded a little strained, actually. "And he hasn't said anything else since then."

Li Ann frowned. "Um, Mac? Is it okay if I look in your book?"

Mac shrugged, one-shouldered.

Li Ann reached over gingerly and took the notebook. She flipped to the last written page. It was densely covered in Chinese characters.

I noticed that at least one previous page had been ripped out of the notebook—bits of the missing page's edge were still caught in the coil binding.

"This is just an entire page of swearing," Li Ann said, after a few moments.

"Ah," Vic said, sounding fairly unsurprised.

"Guys, what's going on?" she asked. "Are you having a fight?"

"No," Vic said.

Mac took the notebook, flipped past the page of swearing, and wrote: _Yes_.

"About what?" she said.

"We're _not_ ," Vic said.

 _He won't have sex with me,_ Mac wrote.

Li Ann looked at the page, looked at Mac, looked at Vic, and then looked at me. "I nominate _you_ to mediate this one," she said.

I held my hands up in a surrender gesture. "I just came along for the skiing."

"We don't need anybody to mediate anything," Vic said from the kitchen, grimly scrubbing the frying pan that he'd cooked the morning eggs in. "What did he write? Did he say that I wouldn't have sex with him? Because I think it's pretty _obvious_ why we can't do that right now."

Mac flipped back to the swearing page, left it open, and slumped back, scowling.

"I'm a divorce attorney," I reminded the room. "Do you really want _me_ trying to help you talk through your relationship problems?"

"I'm asexual," Li Ann pointed out. "This is not my area of expertise."

I looked at her, my mouth quirking. "Rock-paper-scissors?"

She rolled her eyes and suppressed a smile. "Sure."

Mac and Vic stared at us. Mac seemed slightly amused. Vic just looked appalled.

Li Ann's paper beat my rock.

I sighed. "Okay. Mac. _What_ were you trying to ask Vic to do?"

Mac wrote _Anything_ and underlined it three times.

"Vic, leave that pan to soak and come over here," I said.

Vic obeyed, walking over with hunched shoulders. He sat on the armchair.

"Okay," I said, "Vic, Mac seems to be feeling sexually frustrated. Do you think the two of you could try figuring out something to do that his injuries wouldn't interfere with?"

"No," Vic said, sounding exasperated. "Because it hurts him to _breathe_."

 _Don't care,_ Mac wrote. _Want to feel something else._

"Something else besides pain?" I guessed.

He nodded.

"Okay..." I wondered if I could solve this problem for them with purely technical advice. _Could_ I think of any sexual activities that Mac could participate in with a broken rib and a bruised throat, and only one usable arm? I mean, I really kind of saw Vic's point here. I looked at Vic. "Maybe you could give him a very gentle hand job?"

"I'm going to go wash that pan," Li Ann said, and headed off over to the kitchen.

Vic, meanwhile, was grimacing. "No," he said, "we tried that."

"You did?" I asked.

"It hurt him too much," Vic said.

Mac shook his head.

" _Yes_ ," Vic insisted. "Mac, you were _crying_."

Mac gave him the middle finger.

"Uh, do you guys want to continue this conversation privately, maybe?" I asked.

Mac nodded.

" _No,_ " Vic said. "I'm done talking about it. Mac, I _refuse_ to hurt you."

I suddenly realized that I might have some insight into their problem here. I remembered Vic telling me about how he'd hurt Mac the first time they'd had penetrative sex—in that case, because of Mac's unhealed gunshot wound. Vic had been very upset about it.

I was less certain what Mac's angle was, here. I understood that 26-year-old men could be pretty horny sometimes, but if receiving a hand job had made him weep with pain, I couldn't imagine the experience feeling very erotic.

Hm. "Mac," I said, "are you hoping for an orgasm, specifically, or is it more that you're looking for a feeling of intimacy?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then held up two fingers.

"Door number two?" I interpreted, tentatively.

He nodded.

"Okay ... would you feel like your needs were met if you could do something sexual to Vic?"

He contemplated that for a few seconds, and then nodded.

There were possibilities here. Not a lot of possibilities, but possibilities nonetheless. Mac had one good arm to work with. A hand job would probably be too vigorous, but— "How about a nice, slow finger-fucking?" I suggested.

A fairly delighted-looking smile blossomed on Mac's face. Vic, on the other hand, looked suddenly nervous.

"I don't know..." he said.

Meanwhile, Mac had taken up the pen again. _V hasn't let me put anything up his ass yet._

"Oh, Vic," I said. "You have no idea what you're missing."

 _Please???_ Mac wrote. And then he started doodling hearts and roses around it.

"Okay, okay," Vic said, with an embarrassed laugh. He was blushing. "We can ... yes. We can try that. Let's go upstairs."

* * *

Mac and Vic didn't come downstairs until twenty minutes after the food had arrived, and when they did, they both looked pretty happy.

"I had no idea," Vic said quietly to me, wide-eyed.

"I do not need details," Li Ann said primly, but her lips were twitching with suppressed laughter.

* * *

After supper, we put on the Leafs game.

Vic sold it to Mac and Li Ann using me as a proxy: "While we were skiing, Ben mentioned he was hoping to catch the Leafs versus the Devils tonight."

Both of their gazes tracked over to me, looking a little skeptical. I grinned a bit sheepishly, and shrugged. "Sure," I said. "I mean, Toronto's having a good season."

Despite their lack of interest in the game, Mac and Li Ann both elected to sit around the TV with us. Li Ann tucked herself up in the armchair with her poetry book in her lap; as the game proceeded, she glanced up only occasionally. Mac and Vic snuggled together on one of the couches, and I got the other one to myself.

By the end of the first period, the Devils were ahead 2-1 and Mac was asleep, lying down with his head on Vic's lap.

"How's the game going?" Li Ann asked, apparently noticing the pause.

"The Leafs are down by one, but there's plenty of time for them to come back," Vic answered philosophically, with the eternal optimism of a sports fan.

"By the way," I said, "thanks for inviting me along on this excursion. It's been fun so far. And I note with relief that we have encountered no spider-goats."

Vic blinked. "Huh?"

"I warned him up front that sometimes our vacations turn out to be cases in disguise," Li Ann explained.

"I have to say, that sounds very strange to me," I mentioned. "Wouldn't you work more effectively if you _knew_ what you were supposed to be accomplishing?"

Li Ann and Vic made matching faces of ironic amusement. "Would you be up for telling the _Director_ that?" Vic asked, clearly rhetorically.

"Even when we're explicitly working a case, she often withholds key background information, or lies to us about the true objective," Li Ann added, sounding a bit exasperated.

"Why would she do that?" I asked. It sounded like an absolutely ass-backwards management technique.

"She tells us whatever she thinks will get us to do what she wants us to do," Li Ann said.

"She thinks of us more as puppets than employees," Vic said—but lightly, like it was meant to be a bit funny.

"It's effective, though," Li Ann observed. "She almost always gets what she wants."

I shook my head. "That sounds like a very confusing way to work."

Vic shrugged. "Shadowy government agencies, man. What are you going to do?"

* * *

The Leafs tied it up in the second period. There were three minutes left on the clock when Mac started stirring.

At first it was just a few twitches of his fingers, and a brief flicker of a grimace. A moment later, though, he let out a strangled-sounding cry and sat up very suddenly and haphazardly, with a flailing of limbs.

"Shit," Vic yelped, ducking back to avoid an elbow.

Mac's eyes were open, but wild-looking. He clutched at his throat with both hands—the arm in the sling raised awkwardly—and started making a terrible noise, a hoarse, choking wail.

Vic darted in and put his arms around Mac. "Mac," I heard him saying, a bit frantically, "stop, you have to stop that, you'll hurt your throat."

Li Ann had put her book down and was sitting up straight, looking concerned.

"Ah, should I call 911?" I offered in alarm, as Mac's wail cut off into a stuttered series of strangled gasps.

"No," Vic said sharply, shooting me a quelling look before he turned back to Mac. Mac's hands were still up at his throat and he sounded like he was choking. The whites of his eyes showed all around his pupils, and he was staring at nothing.

"Vic, he's having trouble _breathing_ ," I pointed out, standing up. There was a phone in the kitchen, I remembered.

"He just needs to calm down," Vic said. "This happened last night, too. It'll be okay." Vic himself did not sound very calm, I noticed. I stayed on my feet, watching tensely—ready to head for the phone if the breathing situation didn't improve.

Vic leaned in, touching his forehead to Mac's temple. He seemed to be murmuring something. His arms were still wrapped around Mac's shoulders.

Mac dropped his hands, then, and stopped gasping. I felt a quick rush of relief. Then Mac's eyes squeezed shut and he started to rock, meanwhile tucking his knees up in front of him so that he was curled into a fetal-style ball on the couch.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Nightmare," Vic answered tersely.

Well, it was more than a nightmare. Now I could hear Mac's teeth chattering, and he'd started to make a soft groaning noise, which oscillated with the rocking.

Li Ann stood up, and fetched the blanket from where it had been lying crumpled at the other end of the couch I'd been sitting on. She went and tucked it around Mac, and then sat next to him on the side opposite Vic. Mac didn't react to the blanket or her presence, but she murmured "I'm here, Mac, you're safe, everything's going to be okay," and she started rubbing the back of his neck.

"Mac, shhh, you have to stop making that noise," Vic was murmuring in soothing tones, looking very worried.

I realized that I was witnessing a PTSD event. It was deeply disconcerting to see Mac like this. Both Vic and Li Ann had previously mentioned his breakdowns to me, but I suppose the whole thing hadn't seemed quite real when I hadn't seen it for myself. "Ah, is there anything I can do?" I asked, awkwardly.

"Could you make some tea?" Li Ann suggested. "Use the chamomile, it's in the blue tin."

"Certainly," I said, grateful for a task.

It took me several minutes to heat the kettle, find the teapot, and generally put the whole thing together. Whenever I glanced over at the sitting area, I found the situation unchanged—Mac huddled rocking in the middle of the couch, with Vic and Li Ann bookending him protectively.

I brought the steaming teapot out to the coffee table, along with four empty mugs. "Ah, should I pour?" I asked.

"We're not ready yet," Li Ann said evenly. She was the only one who'd looked up upon my arrival with the tea; Vic seemed to be focused entirely on Mac, and Mac was somewhere else entirely. "But go ahead and start without us."

"Well ... maybe I should just go upstairs?" I suggested. "I'm starting to feel like my presence is a bit intrusive." 

"Don't feel like you have to stay," Li Ann said. "But if you don't mind too much, maybe you could explain what's going on in the hockey game, to me."

I gave her a puzzled look. "Now?"

She nodded, continuing to rub the back of Mac's neck even as he shivered and rocked. "I think it might help him to find his way back."

"Okay." I did pour myself a cup of tea—I was feeling rather unbalanced by this turn of events, and just the idea of having a hot mug to cradle in my hands was reassuring. Then I settled back in my previous position on the other couch, and glanced at the forgotten screen. "Well, they're in the intermission between the second and third periods now. You can see, they're doing some replays of the highlights from the second period."

"How many periods are there in total?" Li Ann asked.

"Three. Uh, do you actually know _anything_ about hockey?" I asked her.

"I know you're supposed to hit the ball into the other team's basket," she said. "That's about it."

"It's a _puck_ ," Vic murmured, sounding a bit strained. "And a _net_."

Li Ann smirked—I suddenly suspected that she'd provoked that reaction deliberately. "Okay," she said. "Tell me more."

So Vic and I explained Canada's national (winter) sport to Li Ann. And Mac continued having his breakdown. He was quiet now, except for occasional high-pitched whimpers to which Vic always responded with a gentle shushing and a reminder about his damaged throat. The rocking and shivering didn't diminish for a good half hour—the game was well into its third period when I noticed him finally, gradually, going still. The whole time, Li Ann and Vic had kept touching him, holding him, murmuring occasional reassurances and glancing at him with concern before returning their attention to the TV and our conversation.

Then Toronto scored again, pulling into the lead. "Yeah!" Vic cheered, albeit in a muted tone. "Look at that! I think the Leafs are gonna take it!"

Mac's eyes blinked open and he seemed to focus on the screen.

Vic noticed immediately. "Hey, hey, there you are," he said softly, running a hand through Mac's hair and kissing his cheek. "Better now?"

Mac shook his head, and then clutched his hurt side with his good hand as he unfolded his knees and eased himself into a regular sitting position on the couch. He opened his mouth as though to say something, but only a croak came out.

"Shhh," Vic said quickly, putting a finger on Mac's lips. "You can't talk, remember? Li Ann, where's his notebook?"

Li Ann fished around in the folds of the blanket and managed to extract the notebook and, a moment later, the pen.

Mac took them, balanced the notebook on his knee, and wrote something. From my position, I couldn't see what he'd written.

"No," Vic said. "Not for another half hour."

Mac gritted his teeth and wrote something else.

"It's probably because you were all curled up," Li Ann said. "How about we move you to the armchair? If you stretch your legs out on the footstool and lean back, it'll ease the strain."

Mac shook his head and wrote something else.

"There isn't any," Vic said, frowning. "And anyway, that's a terrible idea."

Mac squeezed his eyes shut, looking frustrated. Then he opened them and wrote something else in sharp, jerky strokes.

Vic stared at the paper. "Huh?"

Li Ann lifted an eyebrow. "He's swearing again. Come on, Mac. We'll help you up."

Mac shook his head again and started scribbling frantically. Li Ann and Vic watched with increasingly concerned expressions. When he finished, he threw the notepad down on the coffee table and struggled to his feet. Li Ann and Vic exchanged a very worried look and trailed after him to the entrance-way, where Mac proceeded to stick his feet into his unlaced boots and throw his coat over his shoulders like a cloak, holding it shut with his right hand. 

"Ah, okay, we can go for a walk, that's a thing we can do," Vic said, starting to put on his own boots.

"It's ten thirty at night," I pointed out, perplexed by their abrupt departure. "It's pitch dark out there."

"There are lights along the trails," Vic said.

"I'm coming too," Li Ann said. But she walked back over to me, first. "Could you do something for us?" she asked me quietly. "While we're gone—could you find all of the sharp knives in the kitchen, and lock them in the trunk of your car?"

"All right," I said, mildly alarmed. "But do you want to tell me what this is about?"

"I'm not completely sure," she said. "Anyway, don't worry, we'll handle it."

In moments, the three agents were gone.

I looked around the empty chalet, feeling a bit off balance. My eye lit on Mac's notebook, still lying open on the coffee table. Feeling that the intrusion was justified by the circumstances, I slid it closer to me and flipped it around so I could read it right-side up.

 _codeine,_ said the first line on the page.

Then: _Please. Hurts to breathe._

_codeine. or booze._

Then there was a line of Chinese characters, and then finally a short paragraph in shakier handwriting: _can't breathe. michael is strangling me. find me some booze or I'll find a knife. can't live like this._

Oh boy.

Vic had told me previously that Mac wasn't making suicide threats (or had he said 'not exactly'?). So this seemed like an escalation.

I really, _really_ wanted to drive the three of them to a hospital the moment they came back through the door. I spent some time thinking about it, considering whether to try just telling them that they didn't have a choice.

They'd told me their reasons for keeping Mac out of the system. But that all seemed very abstract and inconsequential next to Mac's very real threats to self-harm, sitting there starkly in his notebook.

Finally, the thing that convinced me not to try was the memory of Dobrinsky's intervention with the police on Thursday. Within a minute of my placing the call, the police had freed and re-armed Mac—despite their obvious resentment. The behind-the-scenes power of Mac's employer was quite frightening, and invisible to the laws of Canada. I couldn't discount the possibility that the fear Mac had voiced to me was absolutely valid: that if he were admitted to a hospital for psychiatric care, his employer might send an assassin to eliminate him.

I shivered.

So in the end, I did what Li Ann had asked; I searched the kitchen for everything with a sharp edge, and deposited the collection in the trunk of my car.

Then I waited anxiously for the return of the agents. However, when they weren't back by midnight, I decided that I wasn't accomplishing anything useful by waiting up for them. It had been a long, busy day, and I was exhausted.

I went to bed, worries about my secret agents chasing themselves around my head until I fell asleep.


	7. Chapter 7

I woke up around seven-thirty on Sunday. Light was streaming through my bedroom window; I saw clear blue sky above the skeletal winter trees and the peaked roofs of the other chalets.

Of the other two bedrooms, one door was closed and one was open. They'd both been closed last night, and I didn't actually know which of them had been claimed by Li Ann and which by Mac and Vic.

Descending the stairs, I found the muscles in my legs protesting mightily. Apparently I'd been right to hesitate about that second session of skiing yesterday. I limped over to the kitchen to make coffee, noting as I went that nobody else was downstairs—but Mac's, Vic's and Li Ann's winter boots were all piled around the entrance, so at least they'd all made it back last night.

This implied that they were all in the one closed bedroom upstairs. Hm. Okay.

The three of them descended together about forty-five minutes later. They all looked fairly haggard. I immediately put on more coffee. "Good morning," I said in their general direction. "Ah, how's it going?"

"It's a new day," Vic said, sort of philosophically. Mac gave me a weak grin and a thumbs-up. Li Ann just covered a yawn with her hand.

Mac settled on the couch with his legs propped up on the footstool, and Li Ann tucked herself up next to him under the blanket. Mac claimed the remote and flipped to the children's cartoon network. Meanwhile, Vic made scrambled eggs again, along with sausages and toast.

We ate breakfast around the coffee table with the cartoons playing in the background. Mac mostly watched the cartoons, while the rest of us talked inconsequentially. I wondered what had happened last night after they all left, but I didn't feel like the moment was right to bring it up. Mac seemed calm and rather subdued. Vic was giving him a lot of worried sideways glances, but that was understandable considering what had happened last night.

"I'd really like to go skiing again this morning," Li Ann mentioned as we were finishing up. "Would you be up for going out with me again, Ben?"

"Oof, sorry but no, I'm much too sore," I confessed.

"Oh," Li Ann said, sounding disappointed.

Mac reached for his notebook. _Vic and Li Ann can go._

"No," Vic said. "I'm definitely staying with you."

_Srsly, it's ok,_ Mac wrote. _I'm fine now._

"I know you are," Vic said, in a tone of voice that conveyed the exact opposite. He kissed Mac's temple. "But I'm going to stick around anyway."

I was relieved that he'd said so, because I would have asked him to in any case. Without knowing more about how last night's crisis had been resolved, I really wasn't prepared to take on sole responsibility for Mac's well-being.

"I can go out on my own," Li Ann said. "I don't mind."

So she headed out, and the rest of us settled in for a quiet morning. Mac kept watching cartoons, and Vic went to wash the breakfast dishes. I joined him in the kitchen and picked up a towel.

"I'll dry," I offered. "So, hey. What happened last night?"

"He had a flashback," Vic said quietly, glancing over at Mac. "A pretty bad one."

I was relieved at least to hear that what I'd witnessed last night counted as 'pretty bad' in their lives, and not just business as usual. "It looked rough," I agreed. "What happened after you all left?"

"We walked down to the central lodge," Vic said. "It's open all night on Saturday, for the night skiing. By the time we got there it was time for his next pill, so he took that and then we sat in the restaurant for a while. He got calmer once the codeine kicked in, and he told us what was going on."

"Told you how?" I asked. They'd left the notebook here.

"Writing on napkins." Vic smiled faintly. "We went through a lot of napkins." Then the smile faded. "He's really having a hard time right now."

I glanced over towards the couch. Mac was still watching cartoons, with a glazed but peaceful expression. "He seems okay for the moment."

"Yeah." Vic winced. "We decided to increase his codeine dose."

I felt a sharp chill. "You _what_?"

"Just until Tuesday, when he sees his doctor. When he can start _talking_ again. Right now, he's—he's trapped in his own head, and the pain is taking him to bad places. Really _specific_ bad places." Vic braced his hands at the bottom of the sink, under the water, and hung his head. "Michael broke his ribs once," Vic said. "And he used to choke him during sex. During _rape_. Mac's been drowning in those memories for the past two days."

"Oy vey," I said softly, and looked over at Mac again.

He was calm because he was _high_.

He'd tried to kill himself with heroin in prison. He'd tried to kill himself with alcohol last month. And now he'd convinced his loving, protective partners that they could only keep him safe by letting him take overdoses of a prescribed opiate.

These kids were in _way_ over their heads.

Maybe there was nothing I could do to help them. But I felt an obligation to try. "I want to talk with Mac," I said.

* * *

I settled on the sofa next to Mac, and clicked off the TV. Vic followed me out to the living room, but perched nervously separate on the armchair.

"Mac," I said, "Vic tells me that you took more codeine than you're supposed to, earlier this morning."

Mac shrugged. He was wearing the beige turtleneck sweater again, with the blue fabric sling.

"I realize that that might feel like a good idea right now," I said, "but it's not. You can get in a lot of trouble that way, really fast."

He shrugged again, one-shouldered.

"I also understand that you've been really struggling with some of your memories, lately," I said.

He rolled his eyes.

"I'm sorry, I don't know how to interpret that gesture," I said, evenly. "Could you maybe write me a note?"

He looked at me blankly for a moment, but then he did take up the notepad. _What else is new?_ he wrote.

"Okay. You're saying that you've been having these difficulties for a long time, not just recently?"

He tapped the end of the pen against the page a couple of time, and then wrote, _On and off._

Vic craned his neck, trying to see what Mac had written. Then he gave up and came over to join us on the couch. "Was it ever really _off_ , though?" he asked. "I mean, I _thought_ you were okay last year. But you weren't. You were hiding the nightmares and the binge-drinking."

"My point here," I said, "is that the codeine is only going to numb that pain for a very short time. And if you keep trying to fix the problem that way, you're going to have a whole _new_ problem pretty soon, on top of the original one."

Mac gave me a baleful look. Yeah. I knew this wasn't what he wanted to hear.

"I know that you've been working on finding a better solution for yourself," I mentioned. "Vic told me about the meditation."

_Too hard right now,_ Mac wrote, and touched his throat.

"We tried meditation on Friday," Vic glossed, "but he panicked."

_Michael,_ Mac wrote, and touched his throat again.

"Yeah. I wish you'd told us _Friday_ that you were thinking about Michael all the time," Vic said.

Mac shook his head, and wrote, _Trying not to._

"About that," I said. "I was thinking. It seems to me that you could really use some support in the form of an actual, qualified therapist."

"We've explained why that's not an option," Vic said, looking pained. "He can't go outside the Agency. And he refuses to talk to the shrink he was assigned _at_ the Agency, and I think he's right about that, because the Agency's psych division is _not safe_."

"Uh huh," I said. "But what if he could go to somebody outside of the Agency ... in secret?"

* * *

I rang Reshmi's doorbell just after eight o'clock that evening.

She answered right away. "Benjamin, my dear!" she greeted me, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on both cheeks. "Come in, come in."

Fifteen minutes later we were settling into the steaming warmth of her backyard hot tub—clothed decently in swimsuits, of course. "Thanks again for this," I said, feeling my sore muscles instantly loosen up. "I am _too old_ to spend five hours cross-country skiing with no preparation, apparently."

"I'm always happy to find an excuse to relax in the hot tub with a friend," she said, smiling.

Speaking of excuses—as glad as I was to be soaking in hot water, it was about time that I brought up the real purpose of my visit. "Listen, Reshmi," I said, "I have to confess that I had an ulterior motive in inviting myself over tonight."

She raised an eyebrow and sipped at the glass of chilled white wine that she'd balanced on the cedar edge of the tub. " _Other_ than getting access to my hydrotherapy jets? My dear Benjamin, I hope you're not about to come on to me. I may be bisexual, but I have it on good authority that _you_ aren't."

I laughed. "Nothing like that. It's actually work-related, I'm afraid. I have a friend who badly needs a therapist."

"Well, I have some room on my client list," she said. "You can give them my office number."

"It's not quite that straightforward," I said. "There are some issues I should warn you about, before you agree to see this guy."

"Hm," she said. "I don't mind working with challenging cases."

"Some of the challenges in this case won't be the kind that you're used to," I warned her. "But I hope you'll be willing to help him. He's a sweet kid. Twenty-six years old, in a new relationship, holds down a pretty demanding job. But he also has severe PTSD, which is _not_ getting dealt with."

She looked at me a little suspiciously. "Does he know that you're trying to find him a therapist? Benjamin, is this one of your lost lambs from the club?"

"Yes," I said, "and yes. We talked about it this morning. He's agreed to see you, if you'll agree to see him."

"This morning at the ski resort?" she said. "Ah, are you sleeping with this kid? Is that why you're being all weird about this?"

"No," I denied quickly, and emphatically. "Nothing like that. He and his partners invited me to come along as a sort of adult chaperone." I said it ironically, but I'd certainly felt like one there at the end.

"Partners?" she repeated, raising her eyebrow on the emphasized 's'.

Oh, that had slipped out; I'd meant the word in the work-partners sense, but in fact the other sense was also accurate, and relevant. "Yes, his boyfriend and his girlfriend," I confirmed.

"Well, you know that I'm not closed-minded," Reshmi said. "I'm not going to give him any grief over being poly."

"It hadn't even crossed my mind that you would," I said, honestly.

"So why are you still talking about this instead of just passing on my number and being done with it?" she asked. "What's the catch, here?"

"There's several," I admitted. "And you should feel free to tell me to drop this whole thing if _any_ of them sound like deal-breakers to you."

"Well..." she said, narrowing her eyes with a sort of curious skepticism, "go on."

"Okay." I took a deep breath. "First of all, this would have to be off the books."

"What?" she said. "Why?"

"And you couldn't meet him in your office," I said. "We'd have to set up secure meeting places elsewhere—probably a different one each time." Vic and Li Ann had talked this through with me in the afternoon. They'd had a lot of thoughts and concerns about security.

"This is sounding bizarre," Reshmi said. "Not to mention impractical, and seriously dodgy. Why on earth would you think such an arrangement necessary?"

I looked her straight in the eye. "Because he's a secret agent. He works for a shadowy government agency. He doesn't want his employer to know that he's getting therapy from an outside source."

I watched the inevitable progression of reactions flicker across her face: first she thought I was joking, and then a few moments later when she realized that I wasn't, she became concerned that I'd started suffering from paranoid delusions.

"I know how this sounds," I said. "And I'd say 'you don't have to believe me, you just have to see for yourself'—but actually you _do_ have to believe me, in order to make an informed decision about whether to get involved in this."

"Okay," she said. "Let's say I believe you." (She clearly didn't; not yet.) "Wouldn't a shadowy government agency have its own therapists?"

"They do," I agreed. "But they apparently run mad-science style neuropharmacological experiments on their patients, and my friend is afraid of what they'd do to him. And I know _that_ sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but I'm afraid that I do have outside confirmation of it." I took a sip from my own wineglass. "So, try to pretend for a moment, seriously, that you believe me. Would you be willing to sneak around town and give therapy in secret, to a secret agent?"

"Well, it sounds like a lark," she said dryly.

I shook my head. "Reshmi, my love, it's deadly serious. I've had a shocking introduction in the past month to this shadow world. We're talking about a nameless government agency that functions above and outside of Canadian law. You know the James Bond tagline? Licence to kill? My agents have told me stories about their standard work weeks that would make your eyebrow hair curl."

"Your agents?" she repeated. "That's a question. If they're so secret, how is it that you know about them?"

"We crossed paths while they were on a case," I said. "They were given special dispensation to reveal themselves to me, for reasons that I really can't tell you now while I'm still leaving you the option of saying no and walking away." Basically, as soon as I explained how I knew them, she'd know who they were—she'd _attended_ the Two-Ring Circus, she'd seen Mac and Li Ann perform with me.

She took a drink, and looked thoughtful. "What if I say yes?"

"Actually," I admitted, "I hadn't finished listing the catches yet. The secret agents thing was just context."

"Oh dear," she said. "Well, go on."

"You wouldn't be able to take notes about your sessions," I said. "I'm sorry, I know that's inconvenient. And speaking of inconvenient—I'll have to be the go-between to facilitate the setting of the time and place for the meetings, but we can never talk about this on the phone. The agents have informed me that my phone is almost certainly being monitored." That had been a chilling surprise when they'd mentioned it, offhandedly, this afternoon.

"That all sounds very annoying," she observed.

"This next one is more than annoying: you can't refer him on to emergency services even if you're very certain that he's a danger to himself—you've got to just do the best you can in session, and then let him go. And that might come up. He has attempted suicide in the past, and he was making threats this weekend."

She sat up straight. "Benjamin, are you telling me that your friend is in crisis _right now_? Where is he?"

"At home with his partners," I said.

She stood up. The water streamed down her smooth brown skin, and whirlicues of steam swirled around her in the cold winter air. "Well, can you take me there?"

* * *

In fact I didn't know where any of the agents lived, nor did I know which of their three apartments they were spending the night at. But when I called Vic's cell phone and told him that I'd found the CD that I'd offered to lend him, and that I could run it over tonight if he wanted, he gave me his address.

Reshmi raised an eyebrow at me as she towelled off her hair. "Was that a prearranged code? How very spy-versus-spy."

"Actually no, I just made it up off the top of my head," I confessed. "But I think he caught my gist."

In the car on the way there, I explained in more detail _why_ Mac couldn't be brought to the ER for psychological issues, no matter how badly he seemed to need it. Reshmi pursed her lips and didn't reply. I could tell she was still reserving judgment about this whole secret agent thing.

"Oh, and one _more_ thing," I remembered to add when we were almost there. I'd been planning to mention this back in the hot tub, when I'd been explaining the situation and giving her all the reasons that she might want to refuse to take Mac on, but Reshmi's sudden decision to see him tonight had interrupted my carefully thought-out speech. "You have to promise to let at least one of his partners sit in on every session."

She looked at me sideways, pausing in the act of braiding her still-damp hair. "I can certainly do some couples therapy, if it seems to be required. But for dealing with the kind of issues that we're talking about here, PTSD with suicidal ideation, I should be one-on-one with the client. Don't worry, I can explain this to the boyfriend and the girlfriend. I suppose they're very protective? That can happen, when a partner is trying to mitigate and cover up their lover's symptoms without outside support."

"Yes, you're definitely going to see that dynamic," I admitted. "But actually the rule about keeping one of his partners on hand at all times is _my_ condition, and it's for your safety." I braked for a red light, and looked over at her. "First let me assure you, I have never felt unsafe around this young man. Quite the opposite, in fact. In my experience he has always been gentle, and kind, and committed to the protection of others. But. He's six foot three, and very accustomed to violence. In the course of his job, he has killed people. And you're going to be bringing up issues that trigger very difficult emotions, which he is not skilled at handling." The light turned green.

"You actually aren't kidding about all this, are you, Benjamin?" Reshmi said, sounding thoughtfully subdued. I guessed that the reality of the situation was finally starting to sink in.

"Last chance to back out," I said. "We're there."

She raised her chin, looking up at Vic's building. "Well," she said, "I always have enjoyed a challenge."

* * *

Vic let us into the apartment. "Thanks for coming," he said, rather fervently. And then to me, he added: "We should be okay here tonight. I swept for bugs. Twice. But in the future we should really try to go somewhere else."

Reshmi raised an eyebrow at that, but handed Vic her coat to hang up. "So who am I here to see?" she asked.

"That would be Mac," I said, nodding towards where he was sprawled on the living room couch. He had his back to the door, but he craned his neck around with some difficulty to see us. Li Ann, who'd been sitting next to him, stood up and came over to greet us.

"Hi," she said, extending a hand. "I'm Li Ann."

"Nice to meet you," Reshmi said, shaking her hand. She looked tiny next to Li Ann. "I'm Dr. Upreti, but please call me Reshmi. I'm an old friend of Benjamin's." She tilted her head. "Have we met somewhere before?"

"I don't think so," Li Ann said.

Presumably seeing that Mac wasn't getting up, Reshmi padded around into the living room proper to meet him face to face. "Oh," she said with some surprise when she got there. "I know you." She looked back at Li Ann. " _And_ you. You performed with Benjamin, the night of the shooting." She looked back at Mac. " _Mac_. Of course. You're the one who saved Benjamin!" She turned a wide-eyed look back towards me. "You didn't tell me that you were bringing me to see your _guardian angel_."

"If I had," I pointed out, "you would have known who he was. And I'm under very strict instructions to keep their secret identities a secret."

"Hm," she said, with a thoughtful glance back at me. "So now I'm on the inside. Well, I promise discretion." She held out a hand. "Good to meet you, Mac."

Mac shook her hand with a faint smile, and I suddenly realized that in all the excitement, I'd neglected to warn Reshmi that she was about to attempt emergency therapy on a temporarily _mute_ secret agent. "Ah, I forgot to tell you—Mac can't talk right now, due to an injury to his throat."

Reshmi's gaze flicked momentarily over to me and her eyebrows twitched up—I heard her exasperated _Seriously, Benjamin?_ in my head as though she'd sent it to me telepathically. But then she turned back to Mac, smooth and compassionate and professional. "Well, that sounds uncomfortable. How are you making do for communication?"

He picked up the notebook from the coffee table, and fanned through the pages of writing in demonstration. Coming to the first blank page, he set the book down on the coffee table, leaned over with a bit of a wince, and wrote: _Hi._

"Hi yourself," Reshmi said, sitting down on the couch to his left, leaving a foot of space between them. "Now, Benjamin tells me that you've been having some difficulties lately."

Mac just gave a bit of a shrug.

"Yes," Vic said, coming around the couch to sit on Mac's other side. "He's got PTSD, and it's really bad right now."

"Vic," Reshmi said gently, "I'm hearing that you're worried about Mac. It's understandable that you feel that way. But right now I want to hear from Mac." She angled her body more directly towards Mac. "Mac, I see that communication is a bit slow and awkward for you at the moment, but I'm not in a hurry. You know that I'm a clinical psychologist, right, and that Benjamin asked me to come here to see you?"

Mac nodded.

"Benjamin told me that you were open to trying therapy with me; is that also accurate?"

He hesitated, then nodded again.

"Without going into details, would you be comfortable giving me a quick overview of what types of difficulties you're having, or what kinds of feelings you're experiencing that are troubling you? I'd like to start getting an idea of what kind of work we're going to need to do together."

Mac started to lean forward to get at the notebook again, but Vic plucked it off the coffee table and put it on Mac's knee, and then handed Mac the pen.

Mac started writing, frowning faintly in concentration. From where I stood, the writing was upside down, but it wasn't terribly difficult to read. I wondered momentarily if I should avert my gaze to give Mac privacy—but right now this seemed to be an open conversation, where if Mac had been able to speak he'd just be talking.

_I have nightmares about my mother being killed, and some other stuff,_ he was writing. _I don't like talking about it._

"Okay," Reshmi said. "In the type of therapy that I'm probably going to do with you, we won't necessarily have to spend much time talking about the details of the events in your past that caused you distress. We're going to focus on developing tools for managing the feelings that arise in relation to the events, and your body's reactions. And I say 'we,' but you're going to have to do a lot of work yourself. I'll be giving you homework, and asking you to practice in between sessions. Do you think that sounds okay?"

Mac shrugged.

"Mac," Vic said in a low, worried voice, "you have to tell her about what's happening _now_."

Mac just shrugged again.

Vic made a noise—wordless, just a throat-sound conveying exasperation, frustration and worry. And then he took Mac's notebook, and started flipping back through the pages. "Here," he said, handing it to Reshmi. "He wrote that last night."

I could see that it was the page that ended with: _can't breathe. michael is strangling me. find me some booze or I'll find a knife. can't live like this._

Reshmi looked at the page, at Vic, and at Mac. Vic was leaning in, looking urgently at her. Mac was leaning back, with a shut-down expression. "All right, we might need to talk about some of this later," she said. "But I'm seeing one issue that seems to require immediate attention. Michael—is he the one who hurt you? Does he have access to this apartment? Have the police been notified?"

"Michael's dead," Li Ann said, mildly. She'd been standing next to me this whole time, with her arms crossed.

"It was the police who did this to Mac," Vic added, sounding affronted.

Reshmi's professional calm wavered for a moment; her eyes widened, and darted questioningly towards me.

"They're secret agents," I reminded her. "Mac's not in _trouble_ with the police; there was a misunderstanding. And Michael is Mac's ex, who died about a month and a half ago." The details, I figured, could wait.

"Right," Reshmi said, clearly gathering herself. "Okay. At this point, Mac, I'd like to continue our conversation one-on-one—"

I cleared my throat.

"—but I understand that one of your partners will be sitting in with us," she pivoted smoothly. Then she looked at me. "I can have either one? I want Li Ann."

"What?" Vic said, with a bit of a yelp.

"Okay," said Li Ann, simultaneously.

"If Li Ann stays, why can't I stay?" Vic asked.

"Vic," Reshmi said gently, "I need to assess Mac's situation by talking with him directly. I've noticed that you have a tendency to jump in and speak for him. I can tell that that's coming from a place of love and concern, but right now I really want to hear from Mac in his own words."

"But what if he doesn't _tell_ you what's really going on?" Vic demanded, plaintively.

Mac, surprisingly, gave a slightly ironic smile. He took the notepad back, flipped nearly to the front, and stopped on the _I need help please_ page. He handed it to Reshmi.

She looked at it. "Okay," she said. "Well, that's what I'm here for. And thanks for being open with me. Asking for help can sometimes take a lot of courage."

"Actually, I wrote that for him," Vic confessed, looking pained. "On Friday. He kept trying to do things that he needed two hands for."

"Ah," Reshmi said thoughtfully. "Mac. When you showed me that page, were you saying that you believe you need help, or were you showing me evidence of Vic speaking for you?"

Mac looked at Reshmi for a moment, and then he turned to Vic. His lips formed a syllable, silently.

"Um ... both?" Vic said, hesitantly. Mac nodded, and then Vic repeated with more confidence, "Both. He says it was both."

Mac leaned over and kissed Vic.

* * *

Rather than staying in the living room and getting me and Vic to leave it, Reshmi asked permission to bring Mac and Li Ann into the bedroom. None of the agents had any problem with that arrangement.

I intercepted Reshmi as she was leaving the living room. "A word in private first?" I requested, in an undertone. She nodded, and led me a short distance into the hallway that connected the living room with the bedroom and bathroom.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I'm not absolutely sure," I said, "but I think Mac is high right now. I thought you should know."

"What makes you think that?" she asked.

"The way he's acting. He's too subdued, too passive. Not fidgeting. This is not what he's normally like—but it is what he was like this morning, when he was definitely stoned."

"On what?" Reshmi asked.

"Codeine. He has a prescription right now because of the broken rib. But sometime last night or this morning, he and his partners decided on their own to up his dose."

"Because of the physical pain?" she asked. "Or..."

"No, definitely in response to the suicide threat that Vic showed you," I said. "Um, I do know some more details, but I'm not sure if it would fall under ethical conduct to share them with you...?"

"He's not your patient, or client," Reshmi pointed out. "You're just speaking as a friend, and you have no formal obligation of confidentiality. And if you don't mind, I _would_ appreciate a quick heads-up about what's actually going on here, from your perspective."

"Okay." I gathered my thoughts. "The ex, Michael—he and Mac had a ten-year-long relationship, which started when Mac was fourteen and Michael was nineteen."

"I don't need his whole life story," Reshmi murmured. "Just tell me what's going on right now."

"Michael was abusive, and the injuries Mac sustained in the misunderstanding with the police happen to echo some specific injuries that Michael gave him," I said. "Yesterday evening, he had a nightmare while he was napping on the sofa. It triggered some sort of breakdown."

She raised an eyebrow. "Meaning what?" 

I described, succinctly, Mac's half-hour session of rocking and shaking, unresponsive to the attentions of his partners. "From Vic's and Li Ann's reactions, it clearly wasn't the first such incident—but it was apparently a particularly bad one. Afterwards, Mac wrote the page that Vic showed you just now, and then the three of them went off to the ski lodge and had a long conversation on napkins. Following which, they decided to let Mac stay high on codeine until he can start talking again—which is scheduled for Tuesday. I thought, this morning, that I'd managed to talk them out of that plan, but ... apparently not."

"All right," she said. "Thanks for telling me. You can head on home if you like, now—don't wait around for me. I think I'm going to want to sit with Mac until he falls asleep, and then talk to the partners. I'll need to give them some quick-and-dirty guidelines for supporting Mac through the acute phase of the crisis. What I'd _like_ to do is have him admitted for a few days, but—" she looked at me, and I was shaking my head. "Secret agents," she finished, ruefully. "You certainly do know how to bring a bit of excitement into a girl's life, Benjamin."

* * *

When I went to tell Vic that I was leaving, I found him in the kitchen pulling a six-pack with two beers left in it out of the fridge.

"They're left over from last week," Vic explained to my raised eyebrow. "When Mac was off the codeine. I figure at this point we've got to either finish them or pour them out, so—want to have a drink with me?"

Frankly, I was tired and I had work in the morning. But I could see that Vic wanted company. "Sure," I said, discreetly checking my watch. Half an hour for the beer, say, and then an hour to make sure I was safe to drive home—oh well.

We settled in at his dining table and cracked the beers.

Vic took a long pull on his, set it down, and then asked, in a tone of quiet anguish, "Do you think she'll be able to fix him?"

"Ah," I hesitated, "I'm not sure that that's the right question. People don't get _fixed_. But I think she can probably help him manage better."

"Sorry," Vic said, and glumly took another drink. "It's just—it's so hard. Watching him _hurt_."

"Oof," I said, sympathetically. "I can imagine."

Vic's shoulders sank. "I really thought he was getting better. Last week was so much better than the week before."

"Well," I said, "I guess ups and downs are to be expected." Not like I was speaking from a place of expertise, here—but it sounded true. "Mac is dealing with some deep-rooted trauma."

"I know," he agreed with a bit of a sigh. "But the downs scare the hell outta me."

"It must be difficult," I ventured, "being with someone who is so ... um. So seriously ill."

He gave me a bit of a puzzled look. "Mac isn't _sick_ , he's..." he trailed off, looking thoughtful. "Okay, actually yeah. I guess you could say that he's sick. And this fucking thing might _kill_ him, so ... seriously ill. I guess that's a way to put it." He took a drink. " _Yes_ , it's difficult. I've never felt so helpless before. It's awful, loving him and watching him fall apart."

"In retrospect," I asked, "if, say, a couple of months ago, you'd known what it was going to be like ... would you still have gotten together with him?"

"Yes," he said, firmly and without hesitation. Then he glanced at me almost a little apologetically. "I have actually thought this through," he added. "Mac is not really an easy person to be with. But if we weren't together, if I was watching him self-destruct from a safe distance—that wouldn't be better, it would be _worse_."

"Because you care about him," I said. "But what if you didn't? What if you hadn't let yourself fall in love with him in the first place? Wouldn't that have been a lot less painful?" (Oh, no reason. Asking for a friend.)

"There's different kinds of pain," Vic said, thoughtfully. "Listen ... let me tell you about last Tuesday."

"Okay," I said. "What happened on Tuesday?"

"It was a crappy day. Li Ann and I spent the whole day pretending to be cops, knocking on doors, looking for somebody who'd seen—well, never mind the details. It was exhausting and boring and depressing. Li Ann just wanted _out_ by the end of it. She went home. I went to the Agency to pick up Mac."

"Okay..." I sipped at my beer, waiting for the point of the story.

"So he asked me how my day was, and I said that it sucked. And then he told me that he and Nathan had figured out who killed the Norwegian ambassador's cousin in 1973, but that it was a waste of time because it turned out that the perp died in a theatre fire in 1987, so his day sucked too."

"Hm," I said.

"So _then_ ," Vic went on, "he kissed me, and said we should go out for dinner. And it was my turn to pick the place, so we had barbecued ribs. And then we came back here and watched Law & Order." He smiled. "There was a twist twenty minutes in, and another twist at the forty minute mark, and justice was served in the end."

I nodded, raising an eyebrow. "Yeah, I think I've seen that one."

He acknowledged my snark with a tip of his bottle. "And _then_ ," he said, "we went to bed."

"Ah..." I said after a moment, "is that it?" Usually the secret agents' stories were more exciting than that (or terrifying, or horrifying).

"Yes," Vic said.

"Um, I'm not sure I get the point," I admitted.

"The point is that I was _happy_ ," Vic said. "For the whole evening. From the moment I met Mac at the Agency. That _never_ used to happen to me."

"Oh." I looked at him. "I get it now. Thanks."

Take a chance on love.


	8. Chapter 8

The period that followed was hectic and complicated.

I facilitated Reshmi's meetings with Mac and his partners in a series of unlikely locations chosen by the agents, such as abandoned warehouses and municipal tool sheds. I got used to seeing Mac, Vic and Li Ann show up for the counselling sessions armed with blankets, flashlights and lock picks. A disconcerting number of the locations had walls pockmarked with bullet holes.

Reshmi didn't say anything to me about how it was going, of course, but she did roll her eyes a lot about the circumstances. Especially the time that she had to put on hip waders and make her way through part of the municipal sewer system. ("Don't worry, it's just the storm drains!" Vic had assured me earnestly while handing me the equipment.)

Anyway, I assumed that progress was being made. Reshmi met with Mac every day for the first five days, a couple of times a week for several weeks after that, and then just once a week through into June.

On Friday of the week following the chalet experience, I called up _Mac_ for some emotional support—figuring that turnabout was fair play. At that point he was able to talk, but only in a whisper, which made the conversation feel particularly furtive.

"I'm going to ask him out," I said. (I didn't have to clarify what I was talking about it; Mac had been pestering me about it every time I dropped Reshmi off, all week.) "At Drag Night, tonight. I'm going to do it as Jasmine."

"Cool," Mac said, in his throaty whisper. "You think he'll like that?"

"I think it's my only option for making myself brave enough," I confessed.

"Does he do drag?" Mac asked.

I hadn't actually told Mac _who_ it was that I was agonizing over. "No," I said. "He's pretty butch. He has this beat-up leather jacket that he always wears..."

"Vic has one of those," Mac whispered. "It's super hot. You'll see it in the spring."

"Haha, I look forward to it," I said. "Shit, though. I think there's a fifty percent chance I'm going to chicken out tonight."

"What?" Mac whispered. "Why?"

"Because I'm _terrified_. I haven't done this in _years_ , Mac. What if he says no?"

"Not gonna happen," he cheerfully predicted. "You're a catch."

"Ha," I snorted. "Nice of you to say so. But it is extremely likely that he just thinks of me as a friend."

"That can change," Mac pointed out. "And even if he does say no—at least you tried!"

"But then things could get weird, and it'll be so embarrassing," I moaned.

"Okay, that's it," Mac whispered. "I'm coming to Drag Night tonight. You need a cheering section."

* * *

All three of them came. Li Ann in a suit, with her hair slicked back and a moustache pencilled on. Mac, still with his arm in the sling, wearing a tight shimmery silver shirt and the leather pants that I'd bought him for the Two-Ring Circus. Vic just wore jeans and a white shirt, but one small silver hoop earring elevated his look quite effectively.

There was a drag show, to be followed by dancing. I wasn't performing that night, so I sat at a table with the secret agents to watch the other queens do their thing.

Mac placed a fresh notebook on the table. "Lost your voice again?" I asked, automatically touching my own throat in a sympathetic gesture.

He shook his head, and made a wry expression. _Too loud in here,_ he wrote.

"He also isn't drinking, or dancing," Vic mentioned, with a fiercely protective scowl.

So we watched the show. Honestly, I was too nervous to even take it in, but Mac, Vic and Li Ann did seem to be enjoying themselves.

When the show was over and the dancing had started, Mac wrote _Now go for it!_ in his notebook and held it up.

"I don't know..." I said.

Mac just tapped the page.

"That's one way to get in the last word," I muttered.

"You can do it!" Li Ann said, encouragingly.

"You'll be fine," Vic assured me. "And if he shoots you down, come back here and we'll buy you a drink."

* * *

Casey was behind the bar—not bartending, just keeping an eye on things. He came over with a smile when he saw me. "You look great tonight," he said. "I was sorry to see that you weren't in the lineup. I hope you're not still feeling spooked from the shooting."

I shook my head. "I just didn't have time to put anything together this month." 

He looked great too—in my opinion. He was wearing his trademark leather jacket open over a navy blue shirt and jeans. His short-cropped red hair was styled up with a bit of gel. He was going grey at the temples, but who wasn't, at our age? His smile gave me butterfly flutters. "Well, I for one never get tired of your Celine," he said. "Maybe next month?"

"Maybe," I agreed.

Oy vey, how to find my courage? I glanced back at the table where my agents were sitting. Li Ann was sipping her drink and watching the dance floor, bobbing her head gently to the music. Vic had an arm around Mac; they were looking very cuddly. But Mac was looking in my direction, and when he caught my eye he gave me a cheerful, encouraging wave.

"Casey," I said, turning back to him, "I was wondering if you'd like to dance. With me."

He blinked, clearly caught off guard. "What?"

I could feel my face flushing—but Jasmine's cheeks had a rosy blush at all times, so I figured I was covered. "Since the shooting," I said, "I've done a lot of thinking. About life, and death, and fear, and courage, and second chances." Oh fuck, that came out _way_ too cheesy. "And I just wondered..."

"—if I'd like to dance," he finished the sentence. "Okay."

"Okay?" I repeated.

" _Okay_." He came out from behind the bar, laughing a little. "Jasmine—Ben—I would love to dance with you."


End file.
